


A Gift for Draco

by SquadOfCats



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anal Sex, Bisexual Harry Potter, Bottom Harry Potter, Consent, Drinking, Emotional Resonance of the War, Enthusiastic Consent, Explicit Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, Fluff, Frottage, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Humor, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Minor Luna Lovegood/Ginny Weasley, New Relationship, Nude Photos, Party Games, Top Draco Malfoy, Valentine's Day, mentions of slut shaming, streaking, supportive friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-03-25 20:38:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13842594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquadOfCats/pseuds/SquadOfCats
Summary: Though their new relationship is going well, both Harry and Draco have trouble communicating and are holding back from taking things to the next level--emotionally and sexually. When Harry decides he is ready for more, he stumbles over how to start the conversation, but figures out a plan with the help of his friends. He comes up with the perfect Valentine's Day gift to show Draco trust, commitment, and desire: sexy pictures of his naked arse. Thankfully, Pansy Parkinson has a camera and is willing to help...





	A Gift for Draco

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thank you to the Mods for this awesome, positive sexy Consent Fest! It was a lot of fun to explore themes of consent, changing boundaries, and finding creative ways to communicate consent in a relationship. 
> 
> Many thanks to my beta, D, who fixed typos, workshoped dialogue, and squished a bunch of ramblings into a story with a theme.
> 
> Disclaimer - I don't own them.

 

**_December 22 – A Party_ **

****

Music from the Weird Sisters’ newest album screamed out of the wireless and throbbed through the too-hot, too-crowded common room as the bodies of a few dozen seventh and eighth year students collided and bumped together to the beat. Harry’s head swirled, his body warm and floating in the haze of sound, of movement, of touch, of smoky warm light pouring from the fireplace and sticky body heat brushing up against him.

Ron clapped him on the back, his hand sharp against the damp, sweaty patch on Harry’s t-shirt. “Your turn, mate!”

His turn. Right. The game. Thoughts were slippery at the moment, after a few cups of a special Christmas Punch, courtesy of the Hufflepuff eighth years. Harry laughed—he wasn’t sure why…just because he could, maybe—as he crouched down to take his turn at the ridiculous party game. With a twist, he sent the empty Butterbeer bottle spinning. The crowd around him cheered and whooped, and Harry egged them on. “Come on! Anyone but Ron!”

“Oi!” Ron shoved him.

The whole crowd laughed, all of them grinning, giddy, rowdy, as Harry awaited his kissing fate. Whirling, faster than he could track with his dizzy eyes, the bottle cycled through each and every one of his friends and classmates. And it didn’t matter who it landed on, really. Harry would snog any of them. They could line up, and he would snog the pants off of all of them! Because he was alive! Dead people couldn’t snog, and, in spite of everything, Harry Potter was not dead. That seemed like a good enough reason to kiss someone. Whoever it was, it didn’t matter.

Except…well. Maybe one of them would matter. Maybe one would be particularly nice to kiss. He grinned at the thought, but it also made something in his chest clench tight and his stomach flip. A plastic cup, nearly empty, hung from his fingers, and he pulled it to his mouth to gulp down the burning-sweet concoction. His head was spinning. The room was spinning. And on the floor, in the middle of a crowded ring of revelers, the bottle was spinning too.

It slowed. Crept to a stop.

Before it could halt, the crowd rang out in a chorus of scandalized “Ohh!”s. Someone cackled laughter. Another person shouted, “No way! This is gonna be good!”

And Harry looked up to see the bottle stopped on the one person who wasn’t laughing or jeering. The one person who would matter in a moment like this. The one person who couldn’t be just a mindless, meaningless party snog. All of the blood in Harry’s body rushed to his skin, and he flushed, hot and light-headed.

From across the room, Draco Malfoy stared at him in surprise. Nerves shone through on his face, though he tried to hide them. Harry saw him clearly, every inch of him, though a drowsy haze spun through the rest of the room. His cheeks and the tip of his nose pink with the heat and the alcohol. A stray lock of blond hair messy and out of place on his forehead. The tension in his brow. The way his neck flexed as he swallowed. The way his lips parted the tiniest bit, hopeful and unsure.

For months, through seeker’s games and long conversations out on the grounds, something had been building between them. Something brilliant. Something terrifying. And now, in the middle of a loud, drunken Christmas party, in a game where he could kiss anyone because it didn’t mean anything, the damned bottle had landed on the one person he was too scared to admit he desperately wanted to kiss. Wanted to…everything. Wanted to mean it.

Harry gulped. Stared. The crowd fell quiet.

Draco forced a smile, a breathy laugh. Forced himself to pretend it didn’t hurt. “You don’t have to.”

“I…” Harry’s mouth fell open, his breath quick and shaky. His heart punched again and again against his rib cage as his head spun with a million things he should do, should say.

Was he alive or not?

The words rushed out past his cowardice, past all of his hesitations. “I want to.”

Draco paled, but nodded. He might have been smiling. “I want to, too.”

The crowd cheered as they lunged at each other, exploded in applause and wolf whistles as they collided. Everything was glorious, spinning, dizzy perfection as Harry grabbed Draco by the waist and Draco twisted fingers through Harry’s hair, and their mouths smashed together. Too hot. Too wet. Too perfect, fuck, Harry thought he might die from how perfect it was, and then their lips—and Draco’s tongue—and the little moan in the back of his throat—and his hands—and—and—

They broke apart to wild cheering. A light flashed. Pansy Parkinson, snapping photos on that stupid camera she had on her all the time. Behind Harry, Ginny, shouted “Took you two long enough!”, while behind Draco, Blaise Zabini echoed the same sentiment.

But Harry only cared about Draco, about the tender, wild, sweet, hungry way he was looking at him. For a moment, both of them stared. And then the grins burst across both of their faces.

Harry asked, “Do you want to--?”

At the same moment that Draco said, “Should we…?”

“Yeah.” Harry laughed as he grabbed Draco by the wrist and tugged him away from the noise and the mess, towards somewhere it could be only them. “Definitely.”

Cheering and cat calls louder than the crowd at the Quidditch World Cup followed them both up the stairs. But then, when the door to the dormitory shut behind them, there was only quiet. Muffled, distant sounds from the party below haunted the dark room, distorted and strange. And that was how Harry felt at the moment. Beyond his body. Mind whirling. Distorted. Strange. But wonderful, too. And Draco…with round, silver moon eyes shining, Draco stared at Harry as if he were, perhaps, the strangest and most wonderful thing in all the world.

They were kissing again before the thought could fully form.

“You…” Draco gripped handfuls of Harry’s hair and pulled them closer together, rough and needy. Whatever he’d meant to say got lost, and he moaned into Harry’s mouth.

Harry echoed the sound. Did he? Was that him or Draco?

Didn’t matter. Desperate, hungry, their tongues slid together, and their bodies too. Feet moving. Walking. Across the room. And then Draco was above him, Harry flat on his back on one of the beds, a tangle of pillows and messy blankets around him. Frozen, Draco hovered above Harry and looked down at him. His eyes were soft and terribly, almost unbearably fond, and his lip trembled as he whispered, “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this.”

A twinge of panic zinged in the back of Harry’s mind, but with the help of the alcohol, he ignored it. He wasn’t sure how to respond to such raw honesty. Maybe later he could find the words to explain that he wanted to know, wanted to understand. They were out of reach now, though, so all Harry could do was crane his neck up and press another kiss to Draco’s swollen, trembling lips.

They kissed and kissed, and it set the room spinning again, and when Draco sucked on Harry’s tongue, it sent a jolt up and down his whole spine. He groaned. Clawed. Grabbed at Draco, trying to get him closer. Wrapped an ankle around the back of Draco’s thigh and pulled them together. Rocked his hips up, and oh! Fuck. That was…they were…both of them.

Were you supposed to get so hard just from kissing?

Harry didn’t think so. But he had also never been kissed like this.

More kissing. They never stopped kissing. Harry didn’t want to ever, ever, ever stop kissing. And little whining moans slipped from Draco’s throat, along with half whispered words Harry wasn’t sure he was even meant to hear. There was a, “Fuck…” as Draco rocked his hips again and again to squeeze their swollen, aching cocks together through their trousers. Harry rocked forward to meet him every thrust, the pressure in his groin building to a blinding, throbbing need. And then, “Oh!” whimpered on a breath as they separated from a deep, wet kiss, just before smacking together again. And once, a shaky, whispered, “Harry,” as Draco’s hands touched and stroked up and down his chest and sides and thighs. Harry groaned and kissed and chased after every burning feeling Draco was giving him.

The hand on his thigh slid, seeking, upward, and stopped at the button on Harry’s jeans. He glanced down between their bodies to see Draco’s long, pale, elegant fingers, fumbling with his zip.

And that was when he panicked.

_Wait. What? What happens…? How? What does he? How do I? What are we? What if...?_

A hundred frantic, half-formed questions seized him and he froze. “I…wait.”

Draco stilled and jerked his hands away. He swallowed hard when he saw the look on Harry’s face. His eyes widened, near terrified. His lip trembled again. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes. Brilliant. I just…” The words were thick in his throat, his mouth suddenly dry. The room was still spinning, but the whirling sensation was less pleasant now when faced with the prospect of ruining everything. Why had he stopped? Things were…it was…

Overwhelming.

And he wasn’t himself.

He had been falling for Draco for months. The thing building between them felt special, meaningful. He didn’t want it to be like this. Drunk, dizzy, fumbling, no idea what the fuck he was doing, while everyone gossiped about them at the party downstairs. That was…no. He didn’t know. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe Draco would hate him. Would mock him. Would think he was a waste of time, was…

But Draco was staring at Harry like he was a wounded bird, delicate and precious. And the fear, the hesitancy on his face, insisted he was terrified he had done the wounding.

“I don’t think I’m ready for…” Harry trailed off, unsure what he was and wasn’t talking about, just knowing that this felt wrong. So did talking about it, but he did that anyway.

“Of course!” Draco sagged, and the timid fear on his face shifted to outright shock, then relief, and then something soft and shaky. He flashed Harry a quick, small smile. “We don’t have to do anything. I…I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t.”

“I assumed you would expect me to…”

“Why would you assume that?”

Draco sat up and cleared a little space between them, a little air. He shrugged. “You have a reputation. All of the gossip pages.”

Harry rolled his eyes and scoffed. Too many magazines and newspapers liked to print rubbish speculating about his love life. “You know none of that is true.”

“I know it’s nonsense, but--”

“No, I mean literally none of it. I’ve never…” Harry sat up and looked down. The words caught in his throat, hot and embarrassed. “I’ve never. With anyone.”

“Oh.” Draco’s brows pinched together. “I haven’t either. Some things. But not everything.”

“Okay.” Harry nodded and tried to think of something, anything at all, to say. Why was this so hard?

“We’re both pretty drunk right now.” Draco took a deep, steadying breath and inched backwards. Away from Harry. Composure slipped over him like a mask. “We probably shouldn’t be doing anything.”

“I really like you.” The words tumbled out of Harry in a rush, jumbled and warm, but the cool distance smoothing Draco’s face scared him. He had to say something.

“Of course you do right now. You’ve got half a bottle of firewhiskey in you.” Draco brushed him off with a little laugh and a shrug. Harry was drunk, but not so much that he didn’t see the hurt and longing hidden behind the gesture. Draco built a lot of walls, wore a lot of masks.

“No, I mean, I really like you.” Harry rose up on his knees and scooted closer to Draco, took his hands and held them tight even though both of their palms were sweaty and too hot. “I’ve wanted this for a long time, too. Maybe not as long as you. But definitely since…” Harry cleared his throat to steady his thoughts, to push through the creeping sense of unsettling fear that crawled up his spine, that made him feel like someone was watching and that he should look over his shoulder. He ignored it. It was just the two of them here, safe and honest. Friends. Maybe more.

Their friendship had been growing since the first night of term, when they’d both been unable to sleep and ran into each other walking around the Black Lake at two in the morning. Through pick-up Quidditch games and weird insomniatic walks, there had been a lot of sarcasm and competition and good-natured insults. But there had been moments of shocking, crystalline sincerity, too. And it was one of those that had done Harry in. “I’ve known that I like you since Halloween.”

Halloween: when Harry’s friends went to enjoy the holiday in Hogsmeade, and Harry stayed behind, somber and thoughtful. Alone. Until Draco turned up with a bottle of Ogden’s and a toast to Lily and James. They sat together for hours, talking, comfortable. By the end of it, Harry’s heart was swollen and soaring, and he knew.

It terrified him. It took a liter of Hufflepuff punch and a round of spin-the-bottle to get him to admit what he felt out loud. But they were here now, and Harry could be brave enough to say it.

Draco stared at Harry through the confession, mask still in place, but his bottom lip pouted out a bit and his eyes looked a little misty. Sincere. He smiled with one side of his mouth, trying to hide it. “Sap.”

“Yeah, well.” Harry grinned, feeling steadier in his own head. “What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want this to just be a drunken snog at a Christmas party. I...I really like you.”

Draco laughed but couldn’t quite look him in the eye. “You said that already.”

“Well. It’s true.” Harry nudged Draco. “When I asked you to stop, it wasn’t because I don’t like you like that.”

“I know, I know. I…” Draco trailed off, looked conflicted and caught up in his own thoughts. He shook his head, sighed, and smiled. “I know.”

“You know…” Harry knew him. Really knew him. It was a nice discovery. Getting to know Draco Malfoy hadn’t been easy, but Harry was rather pleased with himself that he had managed it. He read between what Draco wasn’t saying. “But for a second, you spiraled into bad thoughts and made a bunch of assumptions and you convinced yourself us kissing didn’t mean what you hoped it meant.”

Draco huffed and glared at him. “Yes.”

“I do want to do…” Harry’s cheeks and throat flushed hot, but he pushed forward. Even drunk, he couldn’t make himself voice anything too explicitly. He didn’t know how to say the words without feeling foolish, inexperienced, and selfish. He didn’t know how much he was allowed to want without turning Draco’s nose up in disgust. Vague longing was all he knew, all he had. “Things. Stuff. With you. Just not…right now. While I’m too drunk to remember what hands are. Before we’re…”

Draco laughed fully at that, but not at Harry’s fumbling, and that was a relief. He nodded in agreement. “Right.”

Laughing along, Harry decided it was time to get to the point of all this mess. “Right. So. I really like you.”

“I swear, Potter, I’m going to feed you to a hippogriff if you don’t stop saying that.”

Harry ignored him. “Is it okay if we take things slow?”

“Of course.” Draco’s grin faded and he reached out to touch Harry’s cheek with the backs of his fingers. That was nice. “Harry, of course. Whatever you need.”

“Well, then in that case, do you want to be my boyfriend?”

Draco rolled his eyes and faked a gag.

Harry shoved him hard, but both of them were laughing. “Hey!”

“Ugh.” Draco’s sigh was dramatic, put-upon. “Boyfriend sounds so juvenile. But fine. I suppose.”

“Brat,” Harry said, but he was warm and fond and happy all over.

Draco looked the same. He slowed. Softened. Stared at Harry with so much emotion, so much hesitant promise in his eyes. Quietly, he asked, “May I kiss you again?”

“Yeah.” Harry leaned forward to meet him, smiling. “You’d better.”

In the soft and quiet dark, they kissed and touched and learned each other for a long while. Slow and eager. Thoughtful. Present. With laughter and bumped noses and murmured promises.

Harry’s head spun slower and slower all the while, until it stopped and Draco held him steady and calm.

It was much later, after the kissing slowed and sleep crept up but neither of them wanted to move apart, when Draco whispered, “Harry?”

“Hm?”

Lips moving against the skin of his neck, Draco pressed a secret just beneath Harry’s ear. He felt as much as heard the whispered admission. “I really like you, too.”

Harry was still smiling when he drifted off to sleep.

 

**_February 8 th – A Plan from Hermione_ **

 

A side effect no one had warned him about when engaging in long, frequent snogging sessions with another boy: stubble burn. Draco kept himself clean-shaven, but the little bit of fine, blond, barely-visible stubble that grew onto his face by the end of a day always ended up rubbing Harry’s chin raw.

Not that he’d had any idea what to expect about anything when dating a bloke.

Although there were a few things he had rather expected would have happened by now. And they hadn’t. So what did he know?

Draco leaned into their kiss, his lips soft and swollen, and sighed a happy little moan in the back of his throat. Harry flicked his tongue out and was met with Draco’s in return, eager and responsive. It was a delicious, warm, thorough snog.

Harry could barely focus on it.

_Come on! When are you going to do something?_

A tiny, twitching movement, Harry shifted closer to Draco on the bench seat by the window. Knees pressed together, angled in towards each other, they were close. But not close enough. And Draco didn’t seem to be in any rush to close the distance.

But that distance, that ten inches or so separating their torsos, was the only thing occupying space in Harry’s brain.

Draco ran a hand through Harry’s hair and pulled their mouths tighter together, letting their tongues wander deeper, and fuck that felt nice. Harry groaned. Draco’s other hand, resting on Harry’s knee, inched further up his thigh.

_Yes! That’s it!_

He leaned into it, kissed harder, panted breath into the space between them. His own fingers twitched, near desperate to reach out and touch Draco in all the hidden, unknown places he wanted to explore, but nerves held him back. It seemed too forward, too selfish to want more. And besides, Harry was giving plenty of signals that he wanted more. If he tried to initiate something, on top of all the moaning and panting and heavy kissing he was leaning into at full tilt right now, he would scare Draco off. And he would be pushing. Harry was a Gryffindor, through and through. He’d always identified more with the bravery and determination aspects of the house, but in some ways he was chivalrous. Slobbering mindlessly and molesting his boyfriend wouldn’t be particularly chivalrous.

Maybe Harry could get things moving without diving on top of Draco. What if he just picked up Draco’s hand a put it where he wanted it? What if…

Panic gripped him and stilled his hands before he could act on the thought. An awful little fear-demon scratched at his spine and set his fight-or-flight nerves tingling. Too much. It would be bad. Something bad would happen if he wanted too much.

No, if Draco wanted more, he would read Harry’s signals and make a move. That’s how it was supposed to go.

So Harry kissed harder and dove in deeper with his tongue, because Draco’s hand…was…moving…

But it stopped a long way short of the indecency Harry hoped for.

_God dammit, Malfoy! If you don’t put your fucking hands properly on me in the next three seconds…_

And then the kissing stopped altogether. Harry resisted the urge to scream and pull at his hair in frustration. The dreamy, dazed look on Draco’s face stopped him short, though, and softened the edge of his irritation. When Draco pulled back and looked at him, his smile was loose and free and utterly, perfectly happy. It blazed through his gray eyes, the curve of his mouth. The smoothness of his face showed him free of any lines of worry.

That tender, well-kissed bliss was a bloody fantastic look on Draco.

He was so obviously content with what they had, with what they were doing. Why couldn’t Harry be the same? He felt like a selfish, ungrateful arse for wanting more, and guilt twisted his stomach.

A splotch on Draco’s chin burned red. Stubble burn. And always worse for him, because his skin was so pale and sensitive. A lot of Draco was more sensitive than Harry had known at the start. He kissed his fingers and pressed them to the inflamed patch of skin, just under Draco’s bottom lip to soothe the burn.

Draco grinned, tiny puffs of laughter hissing from his nose, and did the same to the sore spot on Harry’s chin. He stood up and stretched, but Harry didn’t miss him discretely adjusting his trousers. “I should get going. I don’t want to be late. You know how Pansy gets.”

Harry tried not to roll his eyes. Yes, he knew how Pansy got whenever she thought Draco was spending too much time with Harry: huffy and rude. She was Draco’s best friend, and Harry understood that. But Pansy didn’t seem to understand that Harry was Draco’s boyfriend. He wasn’t trying to steal him away. But they should spend time together! And they should spend time with Harry’s friends! There was nothing wrong with that, but Pansy griped every time Draco joined Harry for lunch at the Gryffindor table, and every time they disappeared for some alone time, and every time in between.

“What’s Pansy got you doing this time?”

“She was going on about the quality of the light at this time of day.” Draco shrugged one shoulder. “She wants me to model for her so she can practice a new photography technique.”

“Mmm…” Harry hummed thoughtfully. “And you are very pretty.”

Draco preened and glowed and flashed Harry a smile over his shoulder. He crossed to the mirror on the dorm wall and straightened his hair, the front of his shirt. “I am, aren’t I?”

“Humble, too.” They both smirked. “Alright. I supposed I can give you up for a few hours. Although I don’t see why it always has to be you she photographs. For all we know, Goyle could be a fantastic model.”

Draco glared at him from the mirror, amused, and continued his grooming.

“Why is she so obsessed with that camera now, anyway?” Harry grumbled. He was a bit frustrated, a bit annoyed, and in the mood to gripe about how his boyfriend was running off to satisfy Pansy’s every whim but didn’t seem too bothered leaving Harry ridiculously, painfully unsatisfied. But that wasn’t fair. His cock ached still, as it took forever to calm down, and he shifted in his seat. Annoyance gripped him, but he rationally knew he shouldn’t blame Draco. Pansy was an easier target. “She never used to care about photography, but she’s barely put that camera down all this year.”

It was dramatic and annoying, like everything Pansy did. She came back for eighth year wearing all black every day, but for signature red lipstick, and talked, loudly, in her shrill voice, about her artistry and composition and lighting and other nonsense.

Back stiff, Draco continued to face the mirror and fuss with his hair. “It’s because of Creevey.”

That yanked Harry’s attention. “What? Colin?”

“They became friends in sixth year. Unlikely, and mostly in secret, but still friends. He rescued her from the unwanted attentions of a very handsy suitor one evening. Got himself punched in the face for it, but Pansy was impressed anyway. And they kept in touch last year. They were…” Draco paused and said carefully, “Close.”

Harry considered it, though thinking about Colin Creevey like that was strange. To Harry, Colin would always be the earnest, annoying little kid with the camera, always trying to tag along with the bigger kids. But he wasn’t that, at the end. He was a friend. He was a hero. Charging up to a bigger, more brutish guy, thinking only of the girl who needed help, sounded very much like the young man Colin had grown up to be. That too-brave young man, that too-excitable little kid had died in battle, and it still hurt Harry in a raw, unconsidered way to think about it too much. “Were they together?”

“I don’t know for sure. She’s never said, and she has been surprisingly private about it all.” Through all of this, Draco spoke to his own reflection in the mirror. He didn’t look at Harry once. “I think so, though. Maybe. I know she cared for him, at the very least. It wrecked her, when he died. Anyway, that’s why she took up photography. In memoriam. And she’s kept up with it because she loves it and she rather has a knack for it.”

“Huh…” Harry stared down at his shoes, feeling like more of an arse than ever. “I never knew.”

“Yes, well,” Draco said primly as he finally turned around. He faced Harry with a sharp, cool glare. “You might have known that if you’d ever bothered to get to know her.”

The implication hit like a smack, and Harry’s cheeks heated. “It’s not as if she likes me at all! She doesn’t want to get to know me!”

“Because she thinks you hate her!”

“I don’t hate her!” Harry insisted. “I just thought she hated me.”

“Well.” Draco raised an eyebrow. “That was rather foolish of the both of you.”

The disappointment was sharp beneath Draco’s smooth, steady exterior, and Harry felt small and bumbling. Why was he so bad at being Draco’s boyfriend? He cared about him so much, might even love him, but sometimes it felt like he couldn’t do anything right, like any wrong move forward would crack the whole thing apart. He couldn’t navigate the weird combining of their friend groups without offense. He couldn’t go a day without accidentally insulting him. He couldn’t talk about his feelings without feeling like he was going to drown.

He couldn’t even get Draco interested enough in him to do anything but kiss.

Maybe he was awful at kissing, too. Maybe that was why Draco held back. Maybe soon he would realize that he just didn’t want…

A sick, shaky feeling crawled over him and threatened to grab hold. He rushed and fumbled to push it back, to fix this. “I’ll reach out to her,” Harry promised. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was that important to you. But I’ll reach out to her. I’ll get to know her.”

It was the right thing to say, apparently. A tight half smile curved Draco’s mouth, and when he stared at Harry, he looked genuinely grateful. It made the knot in Harry’s stomach loosen. “Thank you.”

Draco cared for him. Draco liked kissing him. These things were evident…even though sometimes Harry worried and wondered. Draco wanted what they had. Sometimes, though, it felt like he didn’t want anything more physically, emotionally, or otherwise. Why was it so difficult? If they cared about each other so much, enjoyed kissing so much, shouldn’t the rest of it just fall into place and work out? Harry couldn’t help but feel like he was doing something wrong, like he was being selfish and twisting it all up. Like something was holding them back.

“Alright, you should go,” Harry said. “Don’t keep Pansy waiting. Tell her I said hi.”

That widened Draco’s smile. He stood over Harry and leaned down to kiss him goodbye. Harry reached up, craned his neck, and sighed into it. Every single time Draco kissed him, it was warm and rich and perfect. How could he not appreciate that? How could he complain?

“I’ll see you later,” Draco said as he walked away, a smirk thrown over his shoulder, his arse spectacular in his tight trousers.

And Harry was hard again. And alone. And confused. And he felt like a dick, for complaining, for messing up, for not knowing about Colin and making rude assumptions about Pansy. For wondering what was in Draco’s head, and also his pants. For wanting more than what he had, when what he had was so brilliant. This time, Harry didn’t bother to contain his frustration. He grabbed handfuls of his hair, sank forward, and groaned into his knees.

 

* * *

By the time Harry had calmed down enough to leave the privacy of boys’ dormitory, only a handful of students lounged in the inter-house eighth-year common room. Parvati, Padma, and Lavender sat together on one of the couches, laughing quietly. Terry Boot and Justin Finch-Fletchley glared down at a chess board on the table between them. And Hermione sat alone, off to the side in an armchair, reading. Her mouth hung slightly open as she scanned the massive hardcover tome, and she had twisted her wand up with her curls to hold her hair in a loose, springy knot on top of her head.

The sight of her like that, focused and messy and un-self-conscious, made Harry smile, fond warmth flooding him. Probably, Ron and their other friends had tried to get her to go down for dinner. Probably, she hadn’t looked up from her book while she told them, _Go on, I’ll join you in a minute._ And probably, that had been nearly an hour ago.

Harry ignored everyone else. He exhaled long and hard, weary and tense, as he sank down and plopped on the thick carpet in front of Hermione’s chair. She said nothing, kept reading, but absently reached out and scratched at Harry’s head to give him an affectionate pet.

Harry laughed. “You know I’m not Crookshanks, right?”

“I know. I’m not that distracted.” She smiled down at her book, her eyes scanning over the lines. “That was quite the dramatic sigh. Is everything alright?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

She heard the lie in his tone and finally took her eyes away from the page. As she glanced around the room, her brow scrunched. “Where is everyone?”

“They probably went to dinner.”

“Oh.” She peered at him. “Why aren’t you at dinner?”

Harry snorted a laugh and rolled his eyes. “Why aren’t you at dinner?”

“Ancient Runes translation. Complicated stuff.”

As she watched him, waiting for his own answer, Harry had trouble meeting her eye. She knew too much. “I was with Draco.”

She hummed thoughtfully and nudged him with her foot. “Also complicated stuff?”

Harry shrugged.

Hermione closed her book. The pages thudded shut and sent a cloud of dust flying. “What’s the matter?”

That anxious and hesitant beast that often paralyzed him whenever he thought too much about his relationship with Draco clawed its way up Harry’s throat. How could he say it out loud? How could he admit it? You weren’t supposed to just… _talk_ about sex. That was private.

And it was embarrassing, too. He and Draco seemed so good together—were so good together! It was shameful to admit out loud that maybe things weren’t perfect, that being in a relationship didn’t come naturally, that he felt a bit lost.

Harry stared at his shoes. The image of the beat-up trainers with frayed laces blurred and he had to blink to focus.

On the other hand, Hermione was his best friend, and the smartest person he knew, and she always gave good advice.

“Can I talk to you about something?” The question rushed out of him in a low murmur before he could stop himself.

“Of course.”

“No, but, like…” What if she thought he was…he didn’t know. Obscene? For wanting to talk about this? Selfish for wanting it so badly in the first place? He rubbed at the back of his neck. “You’re my best friend. But...are we the sort of best friends who can talk about…” His voice dropped to a whisper, barely spoken. “About _sex stuff_?”

Face blank, Hermione stared at him for a few long seconds. Panic clawed at his chest. Oh no. She thought he was some sort of freak! She was going to be disgusted by him. She was going to—

She snorted. Hard.

And then her lips pursed tight and her brow wrinkled as she battled against laughter.

Well, at least she was _trying_ not to laugh at him. That was something, he supposed.

“Harry.” She was also trying not to roll her eyes, and she said his name with exasperated fondness. “Of course we can talk about sex stuff. We’re best friends! We shared a tiny tent for the better part of last year. I have literally seen you sitting on the toilet before! I think once we’ve seen each other having a poo, we can talk about anything.”

A wicked, red flush rushed to Harry’s cheeks and neck at the reminder of that awkward, horrific memory. “You only saw that because you don’t know how to knock!”

“The door to the loo was a tent flap!” She glared at him, her brown eyes round and accusatory. “What did you want me to knock on?”

“Not literally!” The whisper practically screeched out of him, and as his defensive hysteria built, somehow his humor did too. Fighting back a grin, he went on. “It was a really small tent! Where the hell else did you think I was?”

Hermione buried her face in her hands and shook with silent laughter. “I’m sorry, okay? God, you’re still so grumpy about it.”

“It wasn’t exactly my finest moment.”

“It’s a normal, healthy biological process. Nothing to be ashamed of.” Too amused, eyes damp and shining with smug laughter, she pinned him with a pointed look. “Just like sex.”

She had won, and she knew it. And it was a fair point, although not entirely accurate. He didn’t think a conversation like this was nothing to be ashamed of, generally. After all, he wasn’t about to go discussing his bowel movements with anyone else, and he felt the same way about his sex life. But Hermione was different. If he could talk about this with anyone, it was Hermione.  Harry rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay.”

“Come here.” She patted the cushion beside her and scrunched over against one arm of the plush chair. Even oversized as it was, there wasn’t enough space for them to sit side-by-side, but Harry perched on the other arm and let his legs fall partially on Hermione’s lap. She gave his knee an affectionate squeeze and asked, “What’s wrong?”

How was he supposed to start a conversation about this? Where should he even begin? Harry sighed and shrugged as he tried to pull his thoughts together, tried to force them out.

“He didn’t…” Her voice was tentative and careful. “Draco didn’t pressure you into something, did he?”

“No! Not at all!”

“Good. Right. Good,” she said, noticeably relieved. “Because you know I would have killed him, if he had.”

“I know,” Harry said, and he didn’t mention that Draco sometimes still spoke, with fearful awe, about the time Hermione had decked him in third year. “No, it’s kind of the opposite of that, actually.”

“Oh.” Hermione nodded. “I see. Sex is not happening, although you want it to.”

Embarrassed, Harry murmured, “Yeah. And I feel bad about wanting it.”

Hermione peered at him. “Why would you feel bad about that? There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have sex.”

Harry shrugged and tried to find an answer. He didn’t entirely know. Because he wasn’t supposed to? Because things were already good, so why tempt disaster and be selfish by wanting more? Because this thing with Draco still felt fragile, like something he couldn’t believe he’d been gifted, and he felt frozen with the fear that if he made one wrong move, he would break it all apart. All of that. But he told Hermione the easiest reason. “Because I think maybe he doesn’t want to.”

“Have you asked him?”

Harry shook his head. “No. But we’ve been kissing a lot and he’s never tried to do anything. At all.”

“Alright.” Hermione shifted a bit in the chair. Thoughtful concern tightened her eyes as she thought through the problem. She would figure something out. Hermione could solve anything. “Why haven’t you tried to do anything to him?”

“Because I don’t want to push him. I don’t want to come on too strong.” Harry said easily. There was more to it than that. Nerves and uncertainty held him bad, and a general sense that he shouldn’t ask for more, but those reasons were gray and hard to pinpoint. “I don’t know how, really. And I don’t know that he would want to.”

The look she gave him was a little sad, a little smug. “Have you considered that maybe he’s holding back for the same reason? Maybe he just doesn’t want to push you into a situation where you have to say no. Have you talked to him about it at all? About what you would like to do together?”

Dejected, frustrated, Harry sighed. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Draco grew up pureblood. Purebloods tend to be rather conservative when it comes to sex—emphasis on the purity of the lineage, and all. And it’s not as if your aunt and uncle gave you any positive examples of healthy sex and romance, growing up. I’m not surprised that you’re both a little hesitant.”

That was an understatement. The entirety of Harry’s early sex education had been Aunt Petunia screeching, _filth_ and turning the channel on any kissing scenes on television. Plus, there had been one awful morning when he was ten and had woken up confused and scared, with a sticky wet spot on the front of his pajamas. Aunt Petunia had gone whiter and colder than an ice storm as she berated him. _You’re a filthy, dirty boy filled with filthy, dirty thoughts._

Charming, Aunt Petunia was. And that wasn’t even getting into the _two blokes_ aspect of things. Harry shuddered as he tried not to remember the awful things Vernon used to rant about same-sex relationships. It was not worth thinking about, but Harry felt it safe to say that Uncle Vernon could have made friends with the Death Eaters, sharing awful beliefs like that.

That was how he’d grown up, and then he’d gone to Hogwarts, where sex education was lacking. And he had been busy trying not to die.

Damn. Maybe Hermione was onto something there. He didn’t exactly have good examples to draw from when it came to relationships. No wonder it felt like he was stumbling along, blind and stupid. No wonder he sometimes felt all twisted up and guilty.

Huh! Look at that: the unveiling of a brand new, lovely way his awful childhood had fucked him up. Would the dysfunctional, traumatic wonders never cease for him?

But Harry didn’t think that explained all of it. It helped explain why he was nervous and felt uncomfortable talking about it, but not why he was stumbling and scared. Everything about him and Draco felt so right, and he knew that what they shared together could never be wrong in the way Vernon and Petunia would have thought. No, it was something about him, in him that felt wrong.

While Harry pondered the uncomfortable insight and considered throwing himself face-down in the lake, Hermione cocked her head to one side and put on her best thinking face. “Malfoy is a pureblood.”

“Yeah. You said that already.”

“No, I mean…he’s a pureblood.” Harry didn’t interrupt her and try to hurry her to the point. When Hermione was working through a thought, it was best to let her get there on her own. Interruptions were not wise. She continued on, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful. “I know he’s trying to leave a lot of that behind—not speaking to his father anymore, learning about muggles, and all that. But he probably still has some expectations of how a relationship is supposed to go, based on how he was raised.”

“Okay. So…”

Bright triumph blazed across Hermione’s features, and Harry knew what was coming a half second before she announced, “We need to go to the library!”

Harry glared at her and huffed, but then she leapt up from the arm chair and nearly sent him toppling to the floor. Bloody Hermione. He should have gone to Ron. He scrambled up and chased after her, nearly left behind in the common room as she marched onward towards her new mission. “Why are we going to the library, exactly?”

She grinned. “To look up pureblood courting rituals!”

That was an awful phrase, if Harry had ever heard one. He wanted to sleep with Draco, not…court him. Whatever that meant. Harry wasn’t entirely sure, but pictured a lot of frilly lace and poetry and maybe, knowing pureblood society, animal sacrifice. “Okay. Why?”

“Because it’s the answer to your problem!” Hermione crackled energy as she marched them to the library at a breakneck pace. Her belief in books was inspiring, really, although Harry cursed it at the moment. “You’re holding back. Malfoy is holding back. Neither of you seem to know how to start a conversation about it. But maybe Malfoy is holding back because he doesn’t know how you feel. You’re not always good at talking about your feelings, you know. You’re better at showing, at taking action. If you use some of the pureblood customs he was raised to expect in a romance, you can show him that you’re serious and ready to progress to a new realm of intimacy.” Panting breath, Hermione stopped short, and Harry nearly tripped and fell on the stone hallway as he skidded to a halt beside her. She grabbed his arm and squealed in a most un-Hermione manner, “And it’s just in time for Valentine’s Day!”

Although, to be fair, maybe the squealing, girlish excitement was less for the romantic holiday, and more for the opportunity to create and help execute a well-researched, tactically efficient plan of action. Yes, Harry considered as he dodged around a suit of armor and jogged down a staircase to catch up with her. That was more Hermione’s style.

Three-and-a-half hours of research and absolutely no dinner later, Harry was ready to drop a stack of books on Hermione’s head.

“Here’s one that seems doable,” Hermione muttered down to the weathered page of the ancient book laid out in front of her. Harry sat at the table across from her, stacks of heavy, dusty books surrounding them in organized piles. “This courtship ritual requires the partners to stand naked beneath the light of a full moon, exchange gemstones, recite blessings from Alwynn the Elder’s treatise on the binding nature of love, and then drink this potion…from the ingredients, it looks a bit like a medieval version of Amortentia.”

Harry sighed. After more than three hours of checking rituals, he had come to the conclusion that he and Hermione had different standards for what was reasonable. This one was also not going to work. “Why do so many of these rituals want me to get naked in public?”

Hermione’s face scrunched. “That is a bit odd, isn’t it?”

Weary, hungry, and grumpy, Harry slumped backward in the stiff wooden chair until he sank so low he was nearly under the table. All around them, the library was dim and quiet. Only the books, softly rusting and whispering with fluttering pages all around them as they floated from shelf to shelf, made any noise.

“Well,” Hermione brightened and continued on, undeterred. “Here’s another one! This one suggests that to indicate serious intent, a suitor should begin courtship by offering their beloved the head of a dark hound, so as to symbolically forswear the hunt for any other.”

There was the animal sacrifice! Harry jerked to attention and nearly shouted, victorious and vindicated, but held himself back at the last second. He knew it, though! With ancient pureblood custom, he knew they’d get to animal sacrifice at some point. Bewildered, he insisted, “Hermione, I’m not beheading a dog! Not for any reason! But especially not to get Draco to have sex with me!”

She glared at him like he had suffered one too many Quidditch falls to the head. “Obviously not. That’s completely barbaric. But perhaps there’s a way to modernize it. Does Malfoy like animals? It says the head of a hound, but doesn’t say it can’t still be attached to the rest of the dog. Perhaps you could give him a pet beagle as a gift!”

Dying inside, mouth slack, Harry stared at her. “You think I should give Draco a pet beagle, and that will make him want to sleep with me?”

“Well, committing to a pet together would certainly show serious intent,” Hermione said primly, though she didn’t look him in the eye. “If you’re not keen on a beagle, I think a dachshund would also technically count as a hound.”

“Oh, well, that makes all the difference then,” Harry deadpanned.

“Well, what if you--”

“No! No, no, no, Hermione. No.” Harry slammed shut the book in front of him, and then the one in front of Hermione. Startled, she flinched back, but then sighed and shook her head. “This is useless. I give up. I’ll just die a virgin. Again”

Single-minded, she ignored him. “As I was going to say. Most of these are outdated, but I think you could use some of the common themes to create something that will work.”

Harry’s forehead hit the wooden table with a loud thump that shoved the edge of his glasses into his eye sockets. “How?”

“A gift. That seems to be the one common thread to all of these rituals and traditions. Give him a gift. Something thoughtful. Something that demonstrates trust and intent. Something sensual.” While Harry sighed and huffed and resigned himself to a sexless existence, Hermione reached over and ruffled his hair. “And if that fails, take your kit off the middle of the Great Hall!”

Amusement snorted out of him against his will. “And buy him a dog. But don’t kill it.”

As he and Hermione put their books back and gathered their things, Harry could admit to himself that maybe this wasn’t a complete waste of time. The rituals were stupid and horrific, no doubt. But Hermione might be onto something: that Draco needed some sort of assurance of commitment before moving their relationship to the next level. They hadn’t really talked much about feelings or what they wanted. Harry knew he wanted Draco. He wanted him in a lot of different ways, only some of which made Harry flushed and flustered to think about. But Hermione was right, that he had trouble talking about his feelings. Any time the conversation with Draco edged in that direction, Harry froze and stumbled. He didn’t know how to say how he felt, so maybe Draco didn’t know. A gift could be the perfect way to show that, and to start the conversation Harry desperately wanted to have but couldn’t find the nerves or words to say out loud.

Yes, the more he thought about it as he walked back to the eight year dorms with Hermione, the more he came to like the idea. A gift was perfect. He would get Draco a gift. A gift would show Draco how much he meant to him. And it would show him how much he wanted to rub their dicks together. Or bums. Or something.

Definitely something.

Something that would probably come naturally, once it started to happen. At least, he hoped.

Anyway, he could pay that troll when he was ready to cross the bridge. For now, a gift! For Valentine’s Day!

 

 

**_February 9 th – Therapy from Ginny_ **

         

The gift was a stupid plan.

The problem with getting Draco a gift was, as Harry quickly realized, Draco was a spoiled little rich boy who already had every material thing he could possibly want. His mother, recused in Malfoy Manor alone since the trials, seemed determined to make up for past mistakes by showering Draco in regular tokens of affection. Weekly, the family eagle owl would swoop into the Great Hall with a package of chocolates, first-edition potions books, a pair of fine new leather gloves or a scarf…There was nothing Harry could think to give Draco that Narcissa hadn’t already sent him.

And none of the traditional romantic Valentine’s gifts would work, either. Flowers, chocolates, a stuffed animal…no. All too impersonal. Hermione was clear that the gift should be thoughtful. Something that showed trust and commitment. Something sexy.

After a day of wracking his brain, Harry was starting to think maybe he should just get Draco a damn beagle.

Why was he so bad at this? It shouldn’t be so hard to think of a nice gift to get his boyfriend.

Worry and doubt and an unbearable need to _do something_ made him antsy the whole way through lunch. Beside him, Draco smiled and chatted and tried to prod him into conversation, but he gave one word answers and stayed distracted. It made a little line of annoyance crease the spot between Draco’s eyebrows. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” Harry insisted. _Except that I want you naked and splayed out on this table, right beside the mashed potatoes, but you’ll barely touch me and I’m terrified to ask you for it, so that doesn’t seem likely to happen. And also, I’m pretty sure I’m a shit boyfriend, and maybe a bad person. And I don’t know what to give you for Valentine’s Day, so I hope you like dogs._  He forced a gulp of pumpkin juice down his dry throat and tried not to look too suspicious. “Why do you ask?”

“You’re acting weirder than normal, Potter.” Draco glared at him. After a second of piercing condescension, he huffed and turned back to his bowl of soup. “Fine. Don’t talk to me.”

Words and possibilities caught in Harry’s throat, but he fell short of any of them as Draco plastered on a polite smile and started up a conversation with Hermione about their latest Arithmancy class. For the rest of lunch, Harry only half paid attention to the laughter and chatting all around him, and only ate half of his meal.

He had to do something. This wasn’t like him. Indecision and inaction didn’t sit well in his stomach. Never had.

But he had no idea what he was doing. And unlike all the other times where he’d had no idea what he was doing, but charged in anyway with wand drawn, this situation was delicate. Bold declarations, big action, fire and flight and fighting his way through all came naturally to him. Subtlety was not his strong suit.

Maybe that was another good criteria, though. Any gift he gave Draco should be thoughtful, meaningful, sexy, and bold. Because Harry was a bold person, dammit. Draco knew that and liked it. Draco deserved that part of him, not just a wimpy flobberworm of a boyfriend who was too scared to say or do anything. If their relationship had any chance of moving forward, growing, both with emotion stuff and sex stuff, Harry had to get all those aspects of himself aligned and involved.

If only he had any ideas for a good, thoughtful gift in the first place, let alone a bold one.

Was a beagle bold? No. No, that was stupid and he needed to drop the dog idea.

“Alright, Luna and I are off.” Beside him, Draco stood up from the bench at the Gryffindor table. While Luna ate nearly every meal with Ginny and her Gryffindor friends, Draco always joined Harry for lunch but spent dinners with the rest of Slytherin. “Your refined guests will now depart and leave the rest of you to your pathetic excuses for table manners.”

Luna looped her arm through Draco’s and smiled up at him.

With a gracious sweep of his arm to the rest of the group, Draco announced, “You may weep in our absence.”

Harry rolled his eyes and smiled fondly, Ron snorted and brushed them off, but Ginny slumped to the table with a look of devastation and woe. “How shall we go on? I’ll never recover! I’ll—no, I’m kidding.” Sweet mischief in her smile, she asked, “What are you two searching for today?”

“Frost pixies!” Luna’s blue eyes widened. “They’re especially active this time of year, and their mating dances are lovely to watch. We hope to find a colony or two at the edge of the forest.”

“Right. And the frost crystals they leave behind are useful potions ingredients.” Draco nodded, his explanation prim and proper, but the glance he gave Luna was entirely too soft. Harry saw right through it and smiled, which made Draco attempt to hide his own shy smile. Draco and Luna had regular expeditions on the grounds, searching for mysterious creatures. Draco always pretended he went along with the adventures for the sake of potions ingredients, but Harry knew the truth. Draco absolutely adored Luna. He was not the sort of person to say so outright, but his affection for her was obvious in other ways. And they all knew that Draco would not be the person he was today if not for Luna reaching out to him, empowering the better parts of him, at the start of the school year.

“Good luck. Hope you get some good potions ingredients.” Harry smirked.

Low under his breath, Draco murmured, “Oh, shut up.” The kiss he popped on Harry’s temple felt like a smack upside the head.

The parting kiss Luna gave Ginny was much sweeter.

It twisted something in Harry’s chest. He and Draco were never like that with each other in public. It was all teasing and barbs, with kinder sentiments in private. It felt right for them. But was that how it was supposed to be? Maybe that was one of the things Draco expected in the relationship.

As the rest of the group cleared out and headed to their next classes, Harry grabbed Ginny by the arm and pulled her aside. “Can I ask you something?”

She blinked, eyes wide, and stared at him. “I didn’t do it. It was Ron.”

“Didn’t do what?”

“Whatever it is you’re upset about?” One of her eyebrows lifted and she tilted her head back to peer at him.

“No, nothing like that.” Harry shook his head and led her down the hallway to a small alcove where they could have some privacy. Cold, thin winter light drifted in through the wide glass window, and the chill seeped in past the castle’s warming charms. “You’d betray your own brother like that?”

She shrugged and leaned against the stone wall. “He’d do the same to me. Now what’s wrong with you? What do you want to ask?”

“Was I a bad boyfriend?” Harry asked. He grit his jaw and braced for the answer. “To you?”

“Oh, Harry…” She pouted a smile. “Don’t make me say that!”

Something in him crumbled, some last little bit of hope that maybe everything was fine and this was all in his head, and he slumped down against the wall. “I knew it.”

“Stop. It wasn’t bad. It was complicated.” Ginny grabbed his arm and pulled them both to the floor. Side by side, they sat cross-legged with their knees touching. “This is about you and Malfoy?”

Harry nodded, not able to stand the knowing pierce of her gaze. Ginny had always been able to cut through to the point of his moods or confusions. Sometimes she left him feeling too vulnerable and bare, like she could see his every thought. After a few years of keeping constant secrets, Harry found her sharp intuition, the way she stripped him down without pause, unnerving. But maybe he needed that now.

“Alright, look. Those few weeks with you are some of the happiest memories I’ve got. It was beautiful, what we had. It was victorious and lovely, and it felt like a big, bright _go fuck yourself_ to all the darkness in those days. But we also both knew that we were barreling towards the war. Our relationship was the breath we both needed before the plunge. We never meant for it to last, and that’s what it felt like. Like, maybe you wouldn’t have even let yourself have it if you hadn’t known deep down that it would be quick. But for what it was, it was perfect. I wouldn’t trade it.”

Harry drew in a deep breath full of Ginny’s kind, thoughtful words. They eased the ache in his chest, loosened some of the knots of his tangled insides. He needed to hear this, he realized. Just as much as he needed to hear what went wrong, he needed to hear what went right, too. To know that she had felt the same way he had during those few weeks they’d shared over a year ago did more to sooth his worry than any plan or scheme.

Her hand was firm on his shoulder. They both let it sit there and pass gratitude and warmth between them.

When Harry felt soothed and steady enough to continue, he urged her on. “But there were problems.”

“There were problems.” Ginny nodded. “There were a lot of reasons why we never got back together, at the end of it all. Some were circumstance. Some were me. Some were us changing in different ways. But yeah, some were things you could do better at.”

“Like what?” Hard, uneven flagstones jabbed against him as he shifted to look at her more directly. Soft, worried lines framed her mouth. “What can I work on?”

“Well…” Outside, a thick cloud shifted and let a weak, determined beam of light through the window above them. It hit Ginny’s hair and set the long, red waves burning as she stared Harry down, unblinking. Ginny was not one to approach a hard truth on tiptoes. “We never talked about things. Never talked about feelings, or what it all meant, or where it was going, or what we wanted out of it. And it seems like, since you’re talking to me about this instead of your boyfriend, you’re currently making the same mistake with Malfoy.”

Fair point. And pretty spot on. Harry winced.

“And you were kind of weird about sex.”

At that, Harry groaned and buried his head in his hands. “How could I have been weird about sex? We didn’t have it!”

“Right. But did you want to?”

“I--” Everything clenched up again. It took some effort to calmly, quietly admit, “Yes.”

“I thought maybe you did. But it felt like…” Ginny shrugged. “Like maybe you thought you weren’t supposed to want to.”

It lined up with what Hermione had pointed out the other day, that he was raised to think of it as something shameful. He told Ginny this, but then argued, “But I don’t know why that would stick when nothing else did. The Dursleys also wanted me to be ashamed of being Desi, and of having magic.”

“I don’t think that’s actually the issue. That might have exacerbated things, sure, and made you a bit bumbling and shy. But I think it was more than that.” She twisted her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Let me ask you this: why did you break up with me?”

It hurt a little, to think back on the way those bright, happy days with Ginny had ended—hurt, not like a fresh wound, but hurt like the locket scar on his chest sometimes twinged with the memory of pain. As the war approached, a calm and certain fear had grown within him, and he’d known beyond doubt how it would have ended if he’d stayed with Ginny. “To protect you. I knew they would use you against me, or hurt you to get to me.”

“Right.” Serious and all-seeing, Ginny nodded. “And has there ever been anything else like that?”

Unease and curiosity swirled within him, like he was standing on an edge and hesitating to look down for fear of the depth he might find. Was she right? Had there been other things he’d given up, or hidden, or never spoken of out loud for fear they’d suffer for it?

“Harry, I think you don’t know how to want things.” Gently, Ginny pushed him into the depth of it.

The accusation burned.

Ginny lay a hand on his knee. She was kind. Always. The kindest person he knew. Not kind in a nice sort of way that appeased and sugar coated, but kind in the sort of way that jabbed a finger into a wound to point out a pocket of rot. Kindly, she jabbed her fingers in. “I think your whole life has been like that. During the war, you had to be the hero, the one who sacrificed everything and saved everyone. Even as a little kid, you were used as a servant and no one cared about what you wanted. If your aunt and uncle found out you cared about or wanted something, they took it away! If the Death Eaters learned you wanted something, they used it against you!” Her voice grew louder, more impassioned as she spoke, and her words sent Harry’s heart up into his throat. “You never learned how to want anything for yourself. Because you thought you were supposed to die, so you’d never have a future and there was no point in wanting anything. And also because you got so used to people taking things away from you, breaking them, the second you showed that you wanted them.”

Harry buried his face in his hands. His eyes burned hot and wet. That was…awful. Sad. Pathetic. Infuriating.

And completely accurate. Everything Ginny was saying made perfect sense. It clicked. It smacked. It set his ears ringing and his head spinning, and he felt like a damn idiot for not seeing it before.

He wanted Draco. Wanted sex with him. Wanted a relationship with him. Wanted a future with him.

But he didn’t know how to want any of that. He’d been wracked with guilt, all twisted up, frozen and unsure how to move forward and show Draco how much he cared. Part of it was that he felt like the wanting would make him selfish, disrespectful, a bad boyfriend, a bad person. Harry was not supposed to want things. He didn’t know how. Now that he was allowed to want, he stumbled and froze.

And part of it was the lingering little twinge of terror in the back of his mind that something would take all of this away if he wanted it too much. More than uncertainty, that little scrape of fear ran crooked fingers on his nerves any time he leaned too far into his wanting. He couldn’t admit to Draco, or to anyone else just how much he wanted this relationship. Admitting how much it meant felt like handing the world a weapon that could smash it all apart.

Ginny’s words forced Harry’s mind back to childhood, to the spiders who lived in his cupboard. He had never feared them, never minded them. In fact, he’d liked to think of them as friends. He was unbelievably lonely and alone, and those spindly-legged spiders shared his space and wove lovely, shiny webs for him to look at, and they never hit him or called him worthless. He’d named them. Francis, Taylor, and Alex, because he hadn’t known whether they were boy or girl spiders, and those were the names he could think of that were fine for a boy or a girl. He talked to them sometimes, told them about his days at school, said goodnight to them. But he’d made a mistake one day. He’d spoken too loudly, and Aunt Petunia heard him. When he got home from school that day, his cupboard reeked of chemicals. Those spiders, his only friends back in those sad, awful days, died because someone found out he had wanted them.

That was how he felt with Draco. Unsure and fumbling because of inexperience and a lack of role models, yes. But in the back of his mind lurked a terror that he wasn’t actually allowed to have this, that something would break if he tried. And the lack of ever wanting freely, openly, and without pain left him frozen.

That’s what held him back. Ginny was right. He didn’t know how to want anything for himself.

Raw and exposed and vulnerable, Harry hit the bottom of the abyss she’d shoved him into, and gladly. That was it. The problem was with him. “So what do I do? How do I fix it?”

“Get over it!” When Harry glared at her, Ginny argued, “No, seriously! The war is over. If you are going to live from here on out, the first thing you have to do is accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting things for yourself. Lots of people have manipulated you and scared you into feeling like you’re selfish for wanting anything. Those people can go fuck themselves with the bristly end of a broom.”

Miserable and lost as he was, Harry snorted a laugh.

“Treat the whole thing like you treat the Dursleys. They wanted you to be ashamed of your race? Fuck ‘em. Wanted you to be ashamed of magic? Fuck ‘em! And now, to everyone who has always taught you to be ashamed of wanting anything? You say…”

Harry’s smile was wan and weak, but sincere. “Fuck ‘em.”

Ginny nodded. “And then, to Draco, you say _fuck me_!”

That still felt a long way short of anything he’d be comfortable shouting, but maybe she was right. Everything else she’d said felt like it was right.

She scooted closer and let her head flop onto his shoulder, her long hair tumbling down his front. “You’re not selfish for wanting things. And no one is going to hurt you for that. Not anymore. And if anyone tries, you let me know and I will bash their face in with a bludger.”

“Thank you.”

“So now what are you going to do with Malfoy?”

“I’m not sure,” Harry said. Firstly, he needed to sit with her revelation for a while. Knowing this pattern, shining uncompromising light on it, would help him stop the negativity when it snuck up on him, but he still had questions. “I think being aware of it will help a lot. But I also worry that maybe Draco doesn’t want me like that. And that maybe he doesn’t actually want things to be more serious between us. I want to have sex with him, but it’s more than that. I want to be a better boyfriend, and for us to grow together.”

Ginny nodded along.

“Hermione thinks I should give him a gift.”

“A gift?” she asked. “Not talk to him about it?”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Harry explained. “A thoughtful gift could show him that I’m committed and interested in something more. It could at least get the conversation started.”

“Huh. That’s not a bad idea. I imagine it would be hard for you to talk about, since you’re so stuck in that war-zone-space of not knowing how to want anything. It’s a good idea for you to start things off with a clear gesture, to take some of the pressure off of talking about it.” Ginny considered this. “What are you going to get him?”

Harry shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

As she thought through it, she listed off all of the relevant points on her calloused fingers. “You need something that conveys that you want the dick.”

Blunt, but accurate: that was Ginny to a fault. Harry snorted a laugh, but nodded and didn’t interrupt her.

Another finger popped out. “You need something that conveys that you are serious about the relationship and want it to grow.” And then a third. “And you need something that is obvious enough on those two points that it will launch the conversation for you, so you can just leap right into the heart of it instead of having to get all jumbled up with the start.”

“Yep. And if you have literally any ideas, please share them. Because the best I have right now is get him a dog.”

“What?” Ginny’s face twisted with bewildered, offended shock. “How the fuck is a dog going to get you laid? That’s not sexy! Whose idea was that? Was that Hermione?”

Were it anyone else, Harry would have defended his best friend, but since it was Ginny, he called Hermione out.

Laughing, Ginny rolled her eyes and muttered under her breath, “Sweet Merlin in a mumu. That girl…”

“Alright, well what do you have that’s better?”

“Well, I don’t know! Maybe get him alone somewhere? You could take him to Grimmauld Place. Get it all set up, beforehand. And then lead him into the bedroom where, oh, look at the rose petals on the bed! Is that champagne? Candles everywhere!” Somewhere partway through her description, Ginny’s voice morphed into a weirdly accurate mockery of Draco’s posh accent. Swooning, she flopped over to splay out across his lap. “Oh, Harry! Take me to bed!”

“Don’t do that!” Harry laughed and shoved her onto the floor. “Maybe that would be good, for after we’re more established, but that won’t work now. I think he’d be as likely to hex me as anything! I don’t want to pressure him! That doesn’t send a message of sexy commitment. That just sends the message that I’m horny and unoriginal.”

“Well then come up with something on your own! You ungrateful little--”

Harry tackled her before she could rant at him any further. Squealing laughter, she kicked him hard in the side, her robes riding up to reveal a very not-dress-code-approved pair of beat-up jeans.

When he and Ginny parted to go to the rest of their classes, Harry felt lighter and freer than he had all week, like their conversation had cauterized a wound he’d let fester too long. Painful, but necessary. He still didn’t know what gift to give Draco, but his criteria felt firm. He could figure it out.

He couldn’t say for certain that his fears and hesitations over wanting Draco wouldn’t creep back up every chance they got. But now that he knew them for what they were, it would be easier to deny them traction.

He wanted Draco. He breathed in to fortify himself to the strength of the thought. He wanted him, wanted their relationship, and there was nothing wrong with letting that into the open. He could do this. He would give Draco the gift. It would give him the boost he needed to get past his anxiety and have a conversation about where things were going. He would know for sure where Draco stood. He would feel better about his own insecurities. And then, hopefully, romance and sex things.

 

**_February 11 th – A Lesson From Ron_ **

 

Trying to find the perfect gift for Draco Malfoy was like trying to out-riddle a sphynx. He knew it was possible, but damn did it make his brain hurt. While his friends were all scattered about the castle or the grounds, enjoying the weekend, Harry lay on his back in bed and stared up at the purple draped fabric of the curtains. Forcing thoughts only made his mind go blank and frazzled, but that was all he had left to him. What was he supposed to do?

Maybe it was a bad idea. Better to not go through with the plan at all than pick something wrong out of desperation. If he couldn’t come up with a gift, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. He could, after all, always just talk to Draco about how much he meant to him, and how much he wanted him.

He really wanted to find a gift, though.

Whole body tense and clenching with anxiety, he flinched and jolted up when the door to the bedroom creaked open. It was just Ron. With a sigh, Harry flopped back down.

“How’s it going, mate?” Ron crossed the room to his own bed, which was beside Harry’s. He sat down on the edge of it and clutched a book bag in his lap. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah.” Harry brushed him off. He really needed to think. Distractions at this stage, so close to Valentine’s Day, would be disastrous. “Fine.”

“You sure? Because you look like you’re psyching yourself up to go three rounds with a Horntail.”

At that, Harry stopped moping long enough to give his friend a good look. When he noticed the sympathetic half-smirk Ron wore, he groaned. “Hermione sent you to help me.”

“Yep. Her and Ginny, too.” Ron stretched out a bit and made himself more comfortable, knowing he’d won the battle and snuck his way in. “They thought you could use some advice, man to man.”

“So they sent you?”

Ron nodded and stroked an imaginary beard. “I am eternally wise.”

Harry sighed. Well…it couldn’t make things any worse, could it? He’d rather not have the whole Wizarding world know about his relationship struggles and his internal trauma, but if Hermione and Ginny knew, that meant Ron probably already knew the whole of it anyway. “Alright, fine. Give me some wisdom.”

“Can do, mate!” The old mattress squeaked as Ron shifted to prop his legs up. “Now, what seems to be the trouble?”

Tired and dejected, Harry explained the situation. How he didn’t know how to want things, and it was holding back his relationship with Draco. How things were not progressing, and at first he thought it was just physical but now recognized they were stalled with the emotional, too. How the relationship didn’t come naturally to him, and he feared he was a bad boyfriend. How he didn’t know what Draco wanted or didn’t want, and didn’t know how to ask or share for himself. How he was trying to get over this hang-up, but he still felt guilty and scared for wanting more, for wanting anything for himself.

As Ron listened, his expression hardened from thoughtful and considering, to amused and annoyed. “Mate. You know what I’m going to say.”

Harry did. He grumbled and rolled his eyes, but waited for it anyway.

“Just talk to him!” Exasperated, Ron huffed at him. “Just sit down and have a conversation. Talk about it!”

“But that seems so stupid, though!” Frustration surged through Harry and he sat up fully in the bed. Gesturing, hands tight and quick, he shook the air and tried to force it all to make sense. “That’s not what it’s supposed to be like! I know I have been holding back and unsure how to move things forward, but shouldn’t it be obvious? If we love each other, shouldn’t it be easier than this? If there’s passion, if there’s emotion, shouldn’t it just feel right? If we both want it, shouldn’t it just happen without so much planning? It just seems like I must be doing something wrong, if nothing happens naturally, like it’s supposed to. Like, even though I’m bad at showing it, I must be the only one who wants it.”

For a long, heavy moment, the dorm room hung silent. Ron stared at him, eyes soft and mouth slack, while dust mites floated to the floor between them. “You love Malfoy?”

“I--” Harry’s throat clenched tight and hot, and he had to look away. Everything Draco meant to him welled up all at once. All of the biting, teasing, challenge of him. All of the moments of surprising, quiet thoughtfulness. All the things they got about each other, that they understood when others found them too broken to touch, because their paths had been divergent but strangely parallel. Often, Harry wondered what Draco might say if he asked to live together, after school. They could bicker and bond, and get on each other’s nerves over laundry and go out on dates and figure out how to adult together, and it would be brilliant. All of it was new. Delicate. Hard to say out loud. But Harry wanted more of all of it. He wanted the version where they grew together, sure and steady and unshakable, and it still seemed impossible that he might really get a chance to have it.

To name the wanting out loud felt like a curse on its potential; the words would be too sharp and bright and strong, ready to crack the delicate maybe. But it was important to name it if they were going to move forward. It was safe. No one was going to snatch it away from him. He was allowed to want Draco, and everything a relationship with Draco entailed, and wanting it was healthy and beautiful. The more he repeated it to himself, the more it began to sink in. “I think so. Yeah. I think maybe I love him. Or at least I’m on the way to.”

“Wow. I thought—well, no. Never mind. I don’t know what I thought.” Ron sat with the revelation for a moment, softly stunned. “That’s great. I’m happy for you.”

The simple sentiment warmed him more than he’d expected, but he shrugged it off. “Yeah, ta and all, but it doesn’t really matter if I keep fucking it up.”

“Okay, right, but all that stuff you’re talking about?” As he spoke, Ron hopped up and strode across the gap between them. He settled on Harry’s bed, by his side, and Harry pulled his knees up to his chin to make room. “About how it’s supposed to just happen naturally, and passion, bull shit, bull shit, whatever you said? Why do you think talking is going to fuck it up?”

“I just…” Because that wasn’t how it was supposed to go! Because he didn’t know how to want things for himself. Because he didn’t know how to ask for something so precious and meaningful, didn’t even know how to contend with wanting it for himself in the first place. Because it wasn’t like that in movies or books—there were just signals, two people totally in sync with each other, and then things happened on their own. Because he was sending signal after signal, and Draco wasn’t responding. He didn’t want to have to beg! He just wanted…just… Miserable and small, Harry said, “I just want him to want me.”

“Harry, I’m sure he does. He’s mad about you.” Awkwardly, Ron reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “You know what my mum says about love? She loves to quote this at us. Think she has it crocheted on a pillow cover or something.” Ron paused for emphasis. “Love is not a feeling. Love is a choice. Feelings and all that passionate, lovey-dovey rubbish don’t really matter so much. What matters is how you choose to treat each other, and learn each other, and prioritize each other. You can’t just coast into it on feelings. You have to choose to learn how to be in a relationship with each other.”

Maybe. Maybe that was a decent point. It had more weight, knowing that it came from Mrs. Weasley. “So you think I just haven’t learned yet how to…” Harry shrugged and tried to find the words.

“I think neither one of you has learned how to communicate with each other on this particular topic. He doesn’t know how to read your signals, and all he sees is that you’re hesitant and not talking about it outright. He doesn’t know what to think. Maybe he’s giving off some signals of his own and you don’t know how to read them. It’s not some magic, one-size-fits-all formula, you know. Different people have different ways of communicating whether or not they want something. You have to learn all of Malfoy’s ins-and-outs before you get to a point where everything flows more naturally. It’s alright that it doesn’t come easy. It’s alright that you want something different, something more, even though what you have right now is good. And it’s alright if it takes a bit of work to get situated on the same page.” Ron smirked a little, leaned in closer, and whispered, “That’s why it’s best, in the beginning, to just _talk about it_!”

Harry rolled his eyes but huffed a laugh.

Maybe. Maybe that made sense.

Although he shouldn’t be pleased by it, the thought that maybe Draco was lost just like he was made him feel less tense about the whole thing. All this time, he’d worried that Draco was sailing along, smooth and sure, while Harry was drowning in a disappointing-boyfriend-swamp. That was humiliating and tough to get past. But Ron made it sound like maybe there was hope. The two of them wading through hesitations and miscommunication together, picking their way towards each other along a mucky, uncharted path, felt like something they could face.

“So you and Hermione talked? About…sex. And relationship stuff?”

“Yeah, sure we did. We still do. Things are always changing.”

“How do I start talking about it? How do I even begin that conversation?”

Pensive, Ron propped his head on one fist. “Build on what you have. Have you two ever talked about it at all? Even a little bit?”

As he thought back, Harry shook his head slowly. There had only been… “Once. At the very beginning. At the Christmas party, things were going kind of fast, but we were drunk and it felt weird. I asked him if we could take it slow. And that’s it.”

Face blank, Ron blinked at him once. Twice. He cocked his head to the side. “And you never talked about it again after that?”

“No.”

More blinking. More staring. “You’re an idiot.”

He flinched, taken-aback. “Rude.”

“Harry! You dumb sod!” Ron was on him in an instant, shoving him half-way off the bed, and Harry struggled to keep his balance on the edge. “You told him you wanted to go slow, and then you never told him anything else!”

“But—but! Signals!” His leg slipped to the floor with a thud and he scrambled to hold onto the rumpled sheets as his best friend in all the world, the absolute fucking traitor, repeatedly thwacked him with a pillow. Harry raised his arms up to protect his face and shouted, “I’ve been sending signals!”

“Signals don’t matter right now! You told him not to!” One more solid, hearty thwump of the pillow knocked into Harry’s side, and then Ron gave up the fight. “And like I said before, you two haven’t learned each other’s signals yet. All he knows for sure is what you told him!”

As Harry righted his glasses, knocked askew by the completely unfair and unwarranted pillow assault, he groaned. Was that really what had happened? But…shouldn’t Draco have picked up on what he wanted?

“From where I’m standing, mate, it sounds like you set boundaries with your boyfriend. He has done a very good job of respecting them. And now you’re huffy and frustrated and all worked up that he’s actually being respectful instead of pushing you hard enough to realize that your boundaries have changed.” Ron raised an eyebrow. “That’s mental.”

Dammit. Harry slumped down over his knees. It made sense with everything he had been figuring out over the past few days. He had set a boundary. He had thought he’d been communicating that he was ready for more, but nerves and some weird, twisted up sense of shame and fear held him back from actually saying anything or initiating the next step himself. All of those signals he’d been sending to Draco? He’d thought they were pretty clear. Lots of kissing, moaning, touching. But maybe Ron was right. All of that only signaled to Draco that he was enjoying their time together—not anything more complex than that. And Ron was definitely right that the only way Draco could have learned the truth was if he had pushed Harry, thereby ignoring his request to take things slow.

Oh, shit. Harry’s breath caught and then quickened, shaky, as the blurry memories of that very first night came back to him. It had been Draco who initiated everything. Draco’s hands all over him. Draco burning with passion and sweetness as he confessed he had wanted this for ages. Draco’s hands moving towards his belt buckle. And Draco who looked horrified, who apologized for pushing Harry, who swore they could go as slow as he wanted when Harry made the request.

Draco wanted him. Wanted him passionately, enormously—wanted him in every single way that Harry wanted him back. A rush of heat flooded Harry’s cheeks and chest.

But no matter how much Draco wanted him, he hadn’t pushed. He’d been perfectly, genuinely happy to take things slow, and he never once tried to bend or find a weak spot in the boundary Harry had set. He had been a really good boyfriend.

Maybe good to a little bit of a fault, because he had also never tried to start a conversation about what he wanted, about what came next for them. Maybe he’d felt frozen by the same fear as Harry. Maybe he felt that, because Harry was obviously holding back, he needed to do the same.

All of these messy realizations swirled around him and started to settle into sense. They were both holding back, unsure of how to move forward in many aspects of the relationship. They were both hesitant to talk, to communicate clearly. They both needed to learn each other’s signals. They both had some internalized guilt and shame and confusion to sort out.

It was a lot to work through.

But Harry and Draco were two of the most stubborn, hard-headed people on the planet. And they wanted each other. They could do it. Harry knew they could.

Harry grinned at Ron. “I’m a fucking idiot.”

“Been saying that for years. It’s about time you appreciate my wisdom.” Ron patted him on the back. “You gonna go talk to him?”

“Yeah, I’m going to talk to him.” Harry nodded. “I think I’m still going to get him a gift to get the conversation moving. I want to get him something for Valentine’s Day anyway, and giving him something to show I’m serious is a nice idea. I’ll tell him, and I’ll show him. Cover all the goal posts.”

“Alright, that’s fair.” Beside him, Ron leaned back and propped himself up on his elbows. Harry felt more relaxed now, too, but thrumming with energy at the same time. “And just think! In just three days, you won’t be a virgin anymore, probably!”

“Well, maybe. Still have to talk about it with him.” Harry laughed it off, because that was simultaneously exciting and nerve-wracking to think about. He forced a sense of humor and cheer that he didn’t entirely feel. “But hopefully! And hopefully I don’t fuck it up so badly that he never wants to speak to me again!”

Ron shrugged. “He will want to speak to you again. But yeah, you’re going to fuck it up. You don’t know what you’re doing. That’s kind of just how your first time has to go, you know?”

That’s what he was afraid of. With a sigh, Harry shook his head and grimaced. “And I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

A battle raged across Ron’s features. His cheeks and the tip of his nose turned pink as he bit down and tried very hard, very valiantly, not to laugh. Thin laughter strained his voice, but he held himself together—barely—as he asked, “Need me to give you _the talk_ mate?”

“No. Absolutely not.” Maybe. Although he didn’t think it would do much good. He didn’t have a broad base of sexual knowledge to begin with, but he also didn’t know any men who’d had sex with other men. That was a bit specific, wasn’t it? Not something Ron could speak to. “I know what bits go where, thank you very much. I just…don’t know anything else.”

“You just have to learn. What works for you, what works for him. You’ll get the hang of it.” Smirking, Ron leaned back, and said, “But in general: use a lot of lube; fingers go in before the cock; aim for the prostate; and go slow. You keep those things in mind, and it will go fine.”

Harry nodded along with each point, but then stopped. Wait a second. How would…?

He turned to stare, wide-eyed and accusatory, at his best friend. “How do you know that? Have you had sex with a bloke? And you didn’t tell me?”

“No, not a bloke!” Entire face pink, Ron grinned and looked away. “Hermione!”

“Hermi--” He couldn’t even say it. His other best friend’s name caught in his throat as he tried to process. “What!?”

In a dramatic, hissing whisper, Ron said, “She’s an absolute _freak_ in bed!”

“What did you--? Was it--? How? Transfiguration?”

“Huh…no. Didn’t think about that, actually. Might have been easier.” Ron shook his head. “But no, it was a muggle toy she ordered.”

Slack-jawed, Harry stared and tried to fit this new information into the versions of his best friends that existed in his head. “You let Hermione fuck you up the bum with a muggle toy.”

“Yep. A few times. It’s pretty nice, actually.” Ron looked a bit too pleased with himself. A little pink-cheeked and embarrassed, yes. But also amused and smug, no doubt proud of himself for leaving Harry so bewildered. He cocked an eyebrow and leaned in a little closer. “See? Boundaries change all the time. Talking is good. Talking is essential. Talking occasionally leads to a pleasant surprise for your arse hole.”

At that, Harry lost it and burst out laughing so hard that it doubled him over. Ron laughed with him, and through bubbly, stupid giggles, Harry shouted, “Hermione! That little--! I can’t believe she--! Where did she even get the idea to try that? She must have read about it in a book. A sex book! Please don’t tell me that she has researched sex just as much as she has researched everything else in her life.”

“She has! And you won’t hear me say one word against it, because her diligence has led us to some very satisfying experiments.” While he laughed and defended his kinky-bookworm girlfriend, he rustled through his book bag, pulled something out, and plopped it onto the mattress beside Harry. “Speaking of, that’s for you.”

After he wiped at his eyes enough to see clearly again, Harry saw it was a book with a glistening, naked male torso stretched across the cover. _Double Wands, Double Magic – A Queer Wizard’s Guide to Sexuality and Romance._ “Are you fucking kidding me? Is this from Hermione?”

Ron nodded. “She mail ordered it a couple days ago. Thought you might appreciate a bit of guidance from other gay and bi blokes. But we don’t really know any that well, and you know Hermione. She thinks books are better than people, anyway.”

As Harry flipped through the pages, he laughed and tried not to blush. It was a kind, very Hermione-esque gesture, and it could be helpful and interesting. There were sections on Queer Magical History, on charms and spells to use in the bedroom, on dating advice.

And sex tips. With pictures. Graphic, moving pictures. So many hard bodies. Men kissing, touching. Completely naked, modeling for the camera. Fucking. Oh, Merlin. That was not something he wanted to be looking at while sitting next to Ron. He flipped the page.

It was worse. Fuck, the bloke in that picture was fit.

What was that position? That looked…nice. And the photo…the way they looked at each other…Shit.

Awkwardly, Harry rapidly flipped through pages of his new favorite book in an attempt to appear casual. He had seen porn before, a couple of magazines Seamus kept in his trunk, but never with two men. And never quite so up close.

Had Draco seen photos like this, he wondered? Maybe at some point, after they had talked, this book would be something they could look at together. For the advice!

And, who was he kidding? For the pictures.

Maybe a book like this would be a decent gift for Draco for Valentine’s Day. Maybe a little too technical, though. And presumptuous, since maybe Draco didn’t need a guide. No, really, it was just the pictures that made him wonder.

The pictures…

Harry froze, every muscle in his body tense, as the thought circled through his brain like a Thunderbird pulling together loose clouds to create a powerful storm.

The pictures in this book were sexy, artistic. Done right, something similar could be a nice gift.

A gift like that could represent everything he wanted. Trust. Commitment. Passion. Boldness. The start of something more for them. And it would certainly launch a conversation.

Could he go through with it, though?

Yes, he decided immediately. It was the perfect solution! For Draco, he could dive in head first out of his comfort zone. Especially since he felt sure now that Draco wanted him, that they were both poised, hesitant, wanting to move forward but unsure how. That, Harry could face head on.

But how would it work? And who would he ask to—

Oh shit! A deranged, thin little laugh snuck out of Harry’s throat as he realized the perfect solution. Draco had just told him that he wanted Harry and Pansy to get to know each other. He probably hadn’t imagined Pansy getting to know him quite so up close…

“What the hell are you laughing at right now?” Ron asked. “You look like you’ve gone mad.”

“Nothing.” Harry said. “Only, I just figured out exactly what to make for Draco for Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

Bizarre, brave laughter bubbled through him and Harry clamped his mouth tight to hold himself together. He flipped through a few pages of the book until he found a good picture. Ah, that one would do. An image of a muscular wizard smirked off the page as he bit his lip and palmed at his cock through the thin fabric of his pants. Cheeky, faking sincerity, he flipped the book around to show Ron the picture. “I’m not much of a model. But do you think I could pull off that pose?”

Ron gasped, eyes wide, as he jerked away. Laughing, he covered his eyes. Uncovered them. Peeked back at the photo. Glanced at Harry. Grimaced. Looked away again. And then looked back one more time, thoughtful and surveying. He studied the photo and Harry. “Yeah. You could pull it off. Make sure you angle it the other way, though. To get your good side.”

Thrumming with nervous, Gryffindor excitement, Harry grinned.

 

  ** _February 12 th – A Photo Shoot With Pansy_**

****

Late at night, when the castle was dark and still, Harry crept through the halls. Wrapped in his invisibility cloak, his footsteps quiet on the stone as the torches flickered dim red light along the path, he was struck by a ping of warm nostalgia. Sneaking around in the cloak, after curfew, off to break a few rules…It was just like old times at Hogwarts.

Although, in the old days, he was always sneaking around solving a mystery or tracking a killer or doing something dangerous. A bit different from taking a bunch of sexy naked pictures.

This was better, probably.

Although, with a lump in his throat the size of a dragon egg, he thought he might have been less nervous going up against some of the old dangers.

As he pushed open the door to the empty classroom, Pansy hopped down from where she’d been sitting on a desk. He took a breath and then took off the cloak.

She looked surprised to see him, but not surprised to see him appear out of thin air. “You’re actually going through with it.”

“Yeah.” Harry stared at her. She was still dressed in the remnants of her uniform, her tie loose and shirt buttoned up despite the late hour. Bright red lipstick only made her skin appear pale and sallow, and her winged eyeliner showed off the dark circles that perpetually lingered under her eyes. “We talked about this. What did you think? That I would chicken out?”

The girl who had once tried to send him off to Voldemort looked him up and down, and then shrugged one bony shoulder. “Maybe. I thought it might have been a prank.”

Maybe this was a bad idea. If she didn’t actually want to go through with it, then Harry wanted to know now. He didn’t think his nerves would hold out long if he had to find someone else to take the photos. His stomach sank and he sighed. “Look, if you don’t want to do this, that’s fine. I can get someone else--”

“Stop whining, Potter. I said I would help, didn’t I? And anyway, there isn’t anyone else here who could take a decent photograph of you.” Tendrils of a cold, calculating smile inched across her face. She whispered, “You need my skills to make you look fit.”

That stung a bit, but Harry rolled his eyes and brushed it off. He’d been dating a Slytherin long enough to know when someone was just trying to get a rise out of him. And anyway, she might be right. He needed all the help he could get to look decent in the photos. “Fine.” He stalked past her across the room and dropped the cloak and his bag on one of the desks. High on the ceiling above them, the suspended bones of a dragon on display clacked and whispered as a draft crept through the room. Harry shivered. “Thanks for your help.”

“Sure.” Pansy sorted through her bag and pulled out her camera. “Anyway, I think it’s a good idea. Draco will appreciate it.”

Harry froze. “Really? You think?”

“I know he will.” Pansy pinned him with a sharp look, but spoke carefully. “We’ve talked about you. He cares about you a lot. But he’s scared. He thinks maybe he’s not trustworthy, not good enough for you. And he said it seems like maybe you’re not ready to fully trust him. He’s worried he’s going to scare you off.”

All of the fight and nervousness seeped out of Harry. It was similar to what he’d figure out already, that Draco also felt a bit lost and unsure. But he thought Harry didn’t trust him? That broke Harry’s heart.

Although, he could imagine now that Draco might feel the same way if he heard Harry was scared Draco didn’t want him.

“He said that?”

Pansy nodded, her shiny black, neatly-bobbed hair fluttering about her ears. One corner of her red mouth lifted into a more genuine smile than the one she’d stabbed him with a moment ago. “That’s why I like this gift of yours. It’s mad, to be sure. But you’d definitely have to trust him to give him something like this.”

“I do,” Harry said.

“Good. You’re right to. Draco’s loyalty is ferocious,” she said. Harry remembered the terrified boy who would do anything to protect his family and nodded. He knew. “He won’t betray you, with this or anything else. And I’ll develop the photos with privacy charms. I know he’d never sell you out to the Prophet, but the charms will make sure no one can ever accidentally get ahold of them.”

“Thank you.” Harry swallowed and nodded. He was antsy. He was ready. “So what do I do now?”

Pansy grinned, a tiger’s look. She lifted her camera. “Strip, Potter.”

“Right.” No breath could be deep enough to calm him, but he tried anyway. “Okay.”

She directed him over to the far wall and had him stand still while she studied him through the scope of her camera. A few charms sparkled out of her wand and adjusted the lighting around him. “Good. Alright.”

While she murmured and positioned everything to her liking, Harry stood rigid and tried not to shake in his trainers. Merlin, what was he doing? Was he seriously going to take his clothes off and pose for Pansy?

No, not for Pansy. For Draco. This was for Draco!

Eh. That reminder did little to calm his nerves. Pansy was still going to be there, up close and personal, after all.

“Alright, let’s start with a few shots of you taking off your clothes.”

Harry’s stomach did a back flip and threatened to throw itself out through his mouth in ritual suicide, so as to save him from the tunneling humiliation. This was not done! Stripping in front of an acquaintance was not a Harry Potter-ish thing to do! His hands twitched but stayed locked at his sides, and the inside of his mouth was dry as sand.

“Come on, then.” Pansy glared at him. “They’re not going to be very good nudes if you don’t take your clothes off.”

“Sorry,” Harry croaked. He cleared his throat. “I’m just a little nervous.”

One of Pansy’s overly-plucked eyebrows lifted. “Witch Weekly’s Sexiest Bachelor six months running is scared to show a bit of skin? Come on, Potter. Just pretend I’m one of your many conquests and get on with it.”

“That’s not--” Harry sputtered. Why did everyone believe that rubbish? “None of that’s true!”

The annoyed look on Pansy’s face melted away and her eyes widened. She had a tiny smudge of mascara up on the rim of her eye socket. “What do you mean, none of it?”

“None of it. I’m a virgin.”

Pansy looked horrified by this. Voice shrill and screeching, “So why are you taking nude photos?”

“Because I don’t want to be a virgin anymore!” Harry’s voice also screeched to new heights. “I’m hoping this gift will get Draco and me moving in that direction!”

In wonder, Pansy looked away from him and gazed into the distance. She shook her head. “So, you really never did any of the things the gossip rags said? You never had an orgy with the other Triwizard Tournament champions?”

“No, of course not!”

“And you really never experimented with a centaur?”

“No!”

Laughter bubbled up in her voice now. “And…and…you never got an entire team of Swedish bikini models pregnant just by looking at them?”

Harry glared at her, dead-eyed and unamused.

“Stop! Potter!” Pansy gasped, scandalized. Her hand shot protectively to her stomach and shielded it. “I’m too young to be a mother!”

At that, Harry rolled his eyes and tried not to laugh. “No, okay? None of it is true. I’ve never done anything like that, and I’m a bit nervous! Alright? So just give me a minute to…”

With delicate fingers, Pansy pulled at the knot of her Slytherin tie, slipped it over her head, and dropped it to the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“Leveling the field.” Bright red pops of color caught Harry’s eye as her sharp, painted fingernails flicked over and undid each button down the line of her white shirt. Inch by inch, the rise of her breasts emerged from the fabric. “Never let it be said that Gryffindor has a monopoly on chivalry.”

“I…you…” Words were no use. Harry watched in…fascination? Horror? Appreciation? He’d been shocked too dumb to know the difference. “You’re getting naked.”

“Well, aren’t you a bright one.” Pansy shrugged off her shirt, and then reached around to fiddle with the clasp of her lacy white bra. Before Harry could protest or react at all, she’d unhooked it and dropped it to the floor with the growing pile of clothing.

“Oh my god.” Her tits were fully out, on display, right in front of him! His eyes shot to the ceiling, but not before he’d gotten a full look at them, and dammit, they were pretty nice. A bit pointy, but in a good way, with a nice curve, and that was not something he should be thinking about! He practically screamed up to the ceiling, “You know I’m not gay, right?”

“Aren’t you?” Pansy sounded unfazed. She unzipped her skirt and tugged it down her waist. “What are you? Bi?”

Harry squeezed his eyes shut nodded. He hoped with every fiber of his being that Draco would forgive him for this. This was not how he’d expected this to go!

“Good for you, then.” A rustle of fabric meant she’d gotten her skirt off and kicked it into the pile. “Just don’t enjoy this too much, or I’ll have to hex you and tell Draco. Now. Look at me, Potter.”

Eyes still shut, Harry’s head angled back towards her as if controlled by an Imperius curse.

“Go on, then. You’re allowed to look.”

This was ridiculous. What the hell had he gotten himself into? What was he thinking, setting this up? Pansy wasn’t supposed to get naked!

Although, was that really much worse than Harry being naked in front of her?

Maybe this whole thing was bad.

No. No, he wanted to go through with this. And Pansy was Draco’s best friend. She knew him better than anyone. She wouldn’t set this up and go along with it if it was going to hurt Draco.

Harry took a deep breath, braced himself, and opened his eyes.

Before him, Pansy Parkinson stood stark fucking naked, one hand propped on her hip. Her other hand, she held up out to the side, a pair of lacy pink knickers pinched in between her thumb and forefinger. As Harry stared, she flicked her fingers to send the knickers flying into the pile of her clothes. She smirked. “So, how do I look?”

“Um.” Harry gulped. Too thin, if he was being honest. He could see the line of each rib, and her elbows and knees jutted sharp. But her pale skin was flawless and striking against the glossy black hair on her head and around her…well. Down there. Her breasts were perfect, and the curve of her hips into her waist was smooth and pleasant. Actually, she was lovely. Beautiful, even. He could see the war on her, the ways it had broken her and left her sleepless, the ways she tried to cover the old wounds with make-up and barbs. But she was still standing here, naked and confident, in spite of it all. With a strange surge of fond protectiveness, Harry decided that she looked pretty damn gorgeous. “You look great, Parkinson. Really good.”

“I know.” Her tone was flippant, but Harry thought the smile might have been real. “Now, come on then. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. Start stripping.”

“Right, yeah. Okay.”

As she maneuvered and guided him into position for the first few shots, Harry was tense and trying not to stare at her. The novelty of it passed quickly, though, to his surprise. Soon, her nudity felt almost normal. That was a good sign, that when he stripped everything off, she wouldn’t be too interested for too long. This would be fine.

“Good. That pose is good. Now, look directly at the camera and tug at your tie.”

Harry did as instructed. The first few clicks and flashes from the camera made him flinch, but that was another thing he quickly grew used to.

“Pretend the camera is Draco,” Pansy murmured. “Look right at him.”

The thought of Draco watching him strip in person made Harry’s pulse quicken, and he ducked his head and flashed a bashful smile at the camera without thinking.

Pansy snapped the shot. “Good! That one was good. A little cheeky looks good on you. Try it again like that.”

A few more shots of him undoing his red and gold Gryffindor tie, and he smiled at the camera. In one he tried to channel the photo of that gorgeous man in the book, and he bit his lip.

“Fuck, that’s good Potter! He’s going to love that one.” Pansy lowered her camera. “Let’s move on, yeah?”

She talked and posed him through a few sets of photos of him stripping. He undid the buttons of his shirt, ran his hands over his chest and torso in a way he really hoped was seductive. Embarrassment had him tempted to cover the grotesque, ugly scar the locket had left on his chest, but when Pansy spotted his fingers creeping towards it, she’d stopped him. “Don’t. You look good, Potter. No need to hide anything.” So he hadn’t.

They took extra time getting the perfect shot of him unbuckling his belt, and then unzipping his trousers.

Before he knew it, Harry stood in nothing but his underwear.

“Right.” Pansy said, prim and straight-forward. “Just how explicit do you want to go with these photos?”  When Harry stumbled over an answer, not entirely sure what she meant because how could you be more naked than naked, Pansy explained, “Like, do you want the nude shots to be more tasteful boudoir, soft lighting, show off your bum, but keep the rest a surprise? Or do you want, like, photos of you bent over a desk prying your cheeks open to show off your arse hole?”

Not that one. Dear god. The face he made sent Pansy snickering.

He thought about the photos in the book and tried to articulate how neither of those options was quite what he wanted. “More the first one? But still showing…things.”

“Dick out, but still artsy. Got it! Can do, Potter.” With a quick, sure nod, Pansy marched back to the row of desks and dragged one out into the open space at the front of the room. All of her bits jiggled as she moved, her stomach bunching in rolls and then stretching flat again as she bent and retrieved her wand from the floor. “If you want full frontal, you’re going to need to get your cock up. Go on and fiddle with it while I set up for the next shots. I’ll give you some privacy to get ready. I promise I won’t look.”

A poisoned smirk and wink thrown over her shoulder accompanied the claim, and Harry trusted her about as much as he would trust a grindylow to guard a case of fish.

But she turned her back to him fully as she worked.

Thankfully, Harry didn’t need to stress over trying to get himself hard while she was standing right there, maybe paying attention to him. While Pansy transfigured the desk into a simple bed, Harry picked up his wand and pointed it at…well. His _other_ wand.

Felt a bit risky, to be shooting spells at his family jewels, but it was either that or start to rub one out with Pansy standing right there. He grimaced, braced himself, and murmured the incantation he’d found in the _Useful Charms and Spells_ section of the book.

With a tingling, pulsing rush that left him light headed, a tidal wave of blood violently surged into his cock. He blinked and reached out a hand to steady himself as creeping black spots on the edge of his vision receded. The effect of the spell was immediate. Harry winced and steadied his breathing until the brief dizzy spell passed. It was gone in seconds, but the effects of the charm raged on, tall and proud, in his boxers. His erection was so stiff and full it ached, just on the edge of painful, and he pressed the butt of his hand against it to relieve some of the throbbing pressure.

Damn, that was an effective spell. It was hardly an opportune moment to think of Hermione, while he was half dizzy with a massive hard-on and feeling himself up through his pants, but he couldn’t help but send a silent _thank you_ out to her for that book.

Pansy took her time setting the scene to perfection for the next stage of the photo shoot, and Harry was pleasantly surprised that, in spite of her teasing, she never once turned to look at him. As she transfigured fluffy white linens for the bed and arranged them to her liking, her posture and movements were so uninhibited, it was like she had forgotten she was completely naked. “How are you so casual?” he asked her.

“What, about being naked in front of you?” She paused to fluff a few feather pillows and position them. “Haven’t you heard what they call me? The school broom. Get it? Because everyone gets a ride.”

A guilty knot twisted deep in Harry’s stomach, so cold it would have wilted his arousal had it not been for the charm. Of course he had heard that nickname, and a few others. Pansy had a reputation, to put it lightly. Students, especially in their year, had a lot of names for her, and spread a lot of gossip. Once upon a time, he’d laughed along with them. Now, after spending some time with her, after she’d helped him so much, and knowing how much Draco cared about her, it felt incredibly unkind. “I’m sorry. That’s cruel.”

“And untrue! I do have some standards, thanks very much.” She shrugged, back still to him, and Harry didn’t miss the way the muscles around her spine tightened, the way she instinctively rose straight-backed and proud to face the insinuations. “Some of my other monikers are more accurate. The Whore of Hogwarts. The Slut of Slytherin. Sound like proper titles, don’t they? And they alliterate! I do like that.”

He had heard all of those names, too. None of them had been said with the dry fondness Pansy used, and her determination to brush off the insults brought a sad smile to his face.

How could he have thought he didn’t like this girl? Dramatic, poised, loyal, hiding surprising depth and tenderness under layers of sharp, mean, catty armor: she was so much like Draco.

“What can I say? The small-minded little prudes who infest this school can insult me all they want, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am comfortable with my body and I enjoy a good fuck. I’ve had a lot of sex. You’re far from the first person to see me naked.” The taunting must have hurt. The scorn and disdain and sneering comments from her classmates must have twisted knives into her, especially combined with all the things people called her after the final battle. She didn’t show it. At least not to Harry, who had only just begun to get to know her. She sighed and asked, “Alright, Potter. How’s it going over there?”

“I’m ready.” Harry gulped and braced himself. “You can turn around.”

“Well, that took considerably less time and whining than I thought it would. Now—holy fuck.” As she turned to him, her eyes went wide and her eyebrows shot up to her hairline.

Harry fought against the urge to squirm and cover himself as she stared at him, unabashed. What the hell did she expect? This was what she had instructed him to do, after all. As his cock stood unwavering in its hardness, new annoyance gave him the courage to lift his arms in question and stared a challenge back at Pansy. “What? You told me to get it up.”

“Forgive me. After all your blushing, I was expecting an embarrassed, half-hard erection.” She glared at his boxers. “Not a steel battering ram.”

To be fair to her, he was blushing a little bit, his cheeks hot, but his defensiveness made him brave. “I used a spell!”

“A spell!” Her eyes lit up when she laughed, and Harry scoffed but laughed with her. Their whole situation was too ridiculous to take seriously. “Alright, Potter, let’s get on with it!”

The next set of photos would be much more explicit and embarrassing than the first, so Harry decided the best way to approach it was the same way he approached most challenges: dive in first, feel shame later. He grabbed the length of his dick and palmed it through the fabric of his boxers while staring into the camera in a way that might have been sexy. Pansy gave him quiet, clear little bits of direction and said nothing about the extremely sexually explicit tone the photos had taken, except for one under the breath comment that snuck out when he finally took off his pants.

Completely naked, his too-hard cock, shiny and dusky brown-pink, bounced against his stomach as he moved toward the bed. Pansy murmured something that sounded like, “Damn, Draco, you lucky sod.”

And though the comment brought a pleased little smile to his face, he didn’t respond to it because he didn’t want to go fishing for dick-related compliments from his boyfriend’s best friend.

Although, he hoped Draco had the same reaction when he finally saw the photos.

The rest of the shoot was made less uncomfortable than it could have been, by the simple fact that Harry couldn’t have gotten through it if he hadn’t made the decision to just chin-up and carry on. For Draco.

Fuck, he hoped Draco liked these pictures. Very badly, he wanted him to like the pictures. Thinking of Draco, of how he’d react, gave him another boost. The poses began to feel a little more natural, a little less forced. If he kept Draco in the forefront of his mind, he could imagine the things they might do together in a bed like this, and it kept him in the moment. Lounging on the bed, he maneuvered through several poses, and he grew a little more confident with each one.

Although, it might not have been confidence, really. The charm he’d used produced such a constant, painful erection that any little brush of contact against it eased the throbbing and provided a sensitive tease of much-needed relief from the pressure. After a while of touching and teasing his swollen cock, he slipped into a point beyond care, doing things for the camera because they made him feel good, because they eased the ache. He’d done plenty of wanking before, mostly in secret, fast and dirty in the shower, but it had never felt so encompassing, so powerful as this. It felt good to rub his cock against the sheets, to stretch and move his body in new ways. It felt good to lean into the sexual energy building within him, to flex it and take charge of it instead of trying to hide from it. It even felt good to do this for another person, to have someone watching him, approving of his body. Another rush of blood surged to his cock as he thought about how much better it would feel to have Draco’s eyes on him. It maybe shouldn’t have been a surprise, what with all the self-groping, but he’d thought he’d have to fake a lot of the facial expressions, to make himself look turned on.

He didn’t.

Several shots had him on his stomach, flirting over his shoulder with the camera, and Pansy insisted the gentle rolling of his hips against the mattress gave a gorgeous view of his back and arse.

Good. That was good.

That was…

He almost couldn’t think for how hard he was. Fuck. He ignored the little voice (it sounded rather like Aunt Petunia, to be frank) in his head that insisted this was filthy and deranged, and that he ought to be ashamed of himself. Because he didn’t feel ashamed at all. He felt powerful, sexy, and alive. While Pansy coached him, he pictured Draco, lips kiss-swollen, and gasped a little as he rubbed himself against the bed.

“That’s it, Potter! Now you’re getting into it!” A few rapid fire clicks of the camera’s shutter echoed in the still room as Pansy snapped photos of him. “Now flip over.”

His body felt too warm as he lay on his back and propped himself up amongst the piles of pillows. When Pansy maneuvered him around and gave him instructions on how to position himself, he did as asked. Head tilted back, legs languid and open, he felt not a single ounce of shame as he looked into the lens of the camera. He felt good. He looked good. Draco was going to lose his damn mind over this.

He palmed himself when Pansy instructed, even gripped the base and gave his cock a few long, slow strokes. The camera snapped away while Pansy murmured encouragement.

The grip of his hand was almost too much after all the build-up, and his hips rolled up to push deeper into the touch. Fuck, that felt good. Would it feel like that when Draco touched him? Better, he imagined. How could it not be better? Draco had gorgeous hands. And mouth. And everything. Images of what it would be like flashed through his imagination, _Draco touching him, on him, all over him, in him, In Him, IN HIM,_ and after months of vague longing, Harry suddenly had a very clear idea of exactly what he wanted to do with Draco _._ He was half tempted to run up to the dorms and wake Draco up for a chat right this second. Instead, he worked his hand in slow, liquid strokes up and down his shaft and moaned. He threw his head back as the intensity built up within him and tried to keep his legs from twisting too much away from the angle of the camera. “Oh, fuck.”

“Uhhh...Potter?” Pansy’s voice cut through the haze. “You planning to give him a money shot?”

Harry stilled his hand, but kept it squeezed around the base. He panted, “I don’t know what that means.”

Blunt, a tiny smile tugging at one corner of her mouth, she asked, “Do you want me to take a picture of you coming?”

“I, uh…” Tempting as that was for all the pressure in his crotch, he shook his head and tried to sit up. Sweat dampened his back and chest, and the air soaked cool against his skin. “No. No, that’s okay.”

Pansy lowered the camera. “Save that and show it to Draco in real life?”

Harry laughed a little, still panting with arousal and the exertion of not exploding. “Hopefully.”

“This is definitely going to get you laid, Potter. Trust me. Draco will appreciate it.” A sassy wink had him laughing again, and he hoped she was right.

But even if the photos dissolved or got swept away in a freak flood before he could give them to Draco, he didn’t think he needed them anymore. They would be great. He wanted to share them with Draco, wanted to shock him and excite him. But he had also just stripped down and pleasured himself on camera while a friend snapped photos of him. No shame. No hesitation, once things got going.

As Harry tried to catch his breath and calm down, he let himself rest on the bed and felt at ease. He didn’t just feel good about the experience, or about the quality of the end product. He felt good about himself. Comfortable. Confident. Sexy, even.

What had he been so hung up about in the first place? Whatever the circumstances, gift or no gift, he was ready to talk to Draco. If nothing else, this experience proved to him that the hang-up had all been in his head, and he’d worked through what he needed to work through. He couldn’t wait to talk to Draco, to learn him more fully, to share this and more with him, to plan for a future with him.

“Are you going to…” Pansy looked pointedly at his still-hard cock. “Take care of that? Want me to make myself scarce for a moment?”

“No. Wouldn’t help anyway. The charm keeps it hard, even after…”

Pansy’s eyes widened. “So you can just come and come and come, and have an endless hard on?”

Harry nodded and winced a little. Now that they’d stopped, the throbbing was skirting back into painful territory again. “Could you hand me my wand?”

After she tossed it to him, he cast a _finite incantatem_ on his dick. All of the blood rushed out as immediately as it had flooded in, and the sudden snap made Harry gasp and double over, his body instinctively sure something had gone wrong. “Ah! Fuck!”

Weight shifted the bed beside him and Pansy’s cool hand touched his shoulder. Laughter bubbled her voice as she asked, “You alright?”

He winced and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Is it still attached?”

He laughed into his knees, sucked in a deep breath, and sat up. “Yes. It is still attached.”

“Good. Draco would have been most displeased by that. Can you imagine, giving him photos like that, only to have to tell him, sorry! Can’t recreate this with you! I accidentally vanished it!”

What an awful thought. Involuntarily, he flashed a quick glance down at his cock, which was soft and limp on his lap, looking tired and, thank Merlin, firmly attached to his body. “Thank you. For helping me with this.”

“Any time. You’re a natural model. It was fun to work with you.” Pansy drew her hand back. They sat side by side on the edge of the bed, half a foot of distance between them. “And Draco’s going to love this.”

“Really?” Harry knew it too, but appreciated the confirmation. “You think so?”

“I know so. He’s been drooling over you for years. He and I had a little too much wine when we went to dinner a couple weeks ago. He talked about you. A lot. He’s gagging for your arse.” She side-eyed him and smirked. “Don’t tell him I told you that.”

The thought made Harry smile to himself. He already had a sense of the answer, but asked, “Why didn’t he say something? Or try something?”

“He’s worried he’ll scare you off?” Pansy shrugged. “Why didn’t you say or do something?”

Fair point. Harry flashed through all of the conclusions he’d come to with the help of his friends over the past few days, and announced, “Because I don’t know how to want things for myself after years of war and abuse! Especially sex. I was scared of letting it feel too real.”  

Pansy grinned at him, but it was a shadowed look, a deep look. “Want my advice?”

Everyone had given him advice this week. Couldn’t hurt to get some from Pansy, too. He nodded.

“You’re too in your head. Draco does the same thing. Just let yourself feel it, like you did tonight.”

At that, he did blush a little. Of course, he should have known she would have been able to see that he wasn’t just acting, performing. He had done sexual things on camera and enjoyed it. Now, both of them knew it.

“That goes for sex with him, but also the relationship stuff. Falling in love.” She nudged him with her shoulder. “Don’t overthink it so much. Get in there. Feel it. Enjoy it. God knows there hasn’t been much to enjoy these past few years, for either of you.”

He nodded and thanked her. Both of them fell still and stared out into the empty rows of desks. It felt too quiet now. Too chilly. Harry didn’t know what else to say, so he stood up and gestured at their clothes. “We should probably…”

“Yeah.” Pansy stood too, and in strange, full silence, they crossed the room.

After an hour of shameless exhibitionism, the real world lurked up to meet them and the camaraderie they’d built began to slip. It felt uneasy. He should say something. This had been weirdly fun. Liberating. He felt better about himself and Draco than ever, and a lot of that was thanks to Pansy’s help. It didn’t seem right to let something so big and eventful happen between them, and then leave without marking it properly.

As he bent to pick up his pants, Pansy called out, “Hey Potter?”

He turned to her. She was still naked, her clothes untouched in the pile at her feet. “Yeah?”

“You and your friends used to do a lot of sneaking around the castle, yeah? Lots of ignoring curfew?”

He nodded, unsure where she was going with this.

She grinned like the naked, red-lipped devil she was and asked, “Have you ever gone streaking?”

The laugh that burst out of Harry was bewildered, giddy, and stupid. He shook his head.

Her grin widened and scrunched up her upturned little pug nose in a look that was simultaneously adorable and terrifying. “Come on.”

Before Harry could say another word, the wicked bint grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out the door into the dark corridor.

And that was how Harry ended up streaking through the halls of Hogwarts with Pansy Parkinson. They made it all the way down to the Great Hall without being spotted, Harry laughing and wondering what the hell parallel universe he had fallen into, where he was the sort of person who ran around in the buff. At the heavy wooden doors, Pansy cackled and shoved him in, her small hands hot against his back. He stumbled into the Great Hall, all four house tables and the head table laid out before him, the enchanted sky swirling a clear night of stars above. On the walls, the house banners fluttered at their disruption of the peaceful night. Side by side, he and Pansy looked at each other, looked out at the empty hall, and grinned.

She broke into a run before he did.

Slytherin or not, there was no saying that girl wasn’t brave! Harry chased after her, his lungs already on fire, and they raced each other between the tables, down the length of the room. Screaming, laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe, with their naked bits all flopping about, they ran a lap around the perimeter before collapsing against a wall and laughing some more.

A crotchety old voice startled them both. “What’s that ruckus? There better not be students out of bed!”

Both of them fell silent in an instant, but continued to shake like jelly with uncontainable laughter. Pansy whispered, “Filch! Fuck!”

Harry grinned, delirious, and shushed her. After everything he’d been through the past few years, if he was about to get expelled for streaking…

“Come here, come here,” Harry waved Pansy forward. The snuck back out the door and hid in an alcove behind a suit of armor. There was just enough room that they didn’t have to press up against each other, thank Merlin, but Harry did hiss an apology when his arm accidentally grazed the side of Parkinson’s tit.

They both watched, quivering with amusement they tried desperately to contain, as Filch and Mrs. Norris stalked up the corridor with a lantern.

Barely audible, Pansy said, “If we get caught, let’s say we were imperiused.”

“I can throw off imperius! No one would buy it!”

“Yes, yes, you show off. But you’re Harry Potter. Everyone would turn a blind eye.”

“Shut up, Parkinson!”

They both held their breath as Filch, muttering, trudged into the Great Hall.

“Go! Go! Go!” Harry shoved Pansy back into the hallway and they tore off at a run.

Worn out and laughing weakly, they made their way back to the classroom without another incident. Fun as all this had been, Harry decided he had been naked quite long enough, thank you, and bee-lined for his clothes. “You’re mad.”

She smirked at him as she pulled her knickers on. “Takes one to know one.”

They dressed in comfortable quiet, both still shaken and amused by the ordeal.

“Hey, Potter?”

They were both fully dressed when she spoke again. Harry sat on the edge of a desk to pull on his shoes. “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. For trying to give you up to the Dark Lord that night.” The abrupt, simple apology stopped him still, and he saw the haunting sincerity on her face. With a rueful, distant smile, she told him, “I was a coward. But I want you to know that it didn’t have anything to do with you.”

“I know.” When he thought about it, Harry realized he’d never been nearly so bitter as some of the other students at Pansy’s outburst that night. Many took it as a sign of her complicity, her support for Voldemort. Harry knew better, and he didn’t need her to explain. He’d always known the truth, which was that she had been a scared girl who didn’t want to have to watch all of her friends die.

Especially since she had, apparently, been friends with at least one muggleborn student. A student who hadn’t lived through the battle.

Harry’s throat tightened. “You weren’t wrong. I went to him on my own, before the night was over. I gave myself up. I only wish I could have done it earlier. That way, maybe--”

“I’m not here for your guilt tripping.” She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “You ended it all, Potter. No one could have asked you to do more.”

The way she refused to meet his eye insisted she was done talking about this. Harry wasn’t. Not quite. “I’m sorry about Colin.”

The flinch along her spine, the tightening of her mouth was almost small enough to miss.

“Draco said the two of you were close. He was my friend, too.”

Her stiff mask held for another moment, and then it fell away into a sad, lost smile. She glanced down at her camera and then up at him. “Thank you.”

“How did you two meet?” Harry knew he should back off, but something about her seemed vulnerable, like maybe she wanted to talk about it but no one yet had asked. “It doesn’t seem like a likely friendship.”

“It wasn’t. And I was an absolute bitch who didn’t want anyone to know I was talking to him.” Her long, spindly arms crossed protectively over her chest. “We met because he rescued me. Such a Gryffindor. More bravery and honor than sense.”

That sounded like Colin, and Harry didn’t miss the exasperated fondness in her tone. He stayed quiet and gave her space to explain if she wanted.

She crossed the room and sat down on the edge of a desk, a few feet away from him. “It was sixth year. Fifth, for him. Remember what I said about all those nicknames people like to give me?”

Uncomfortably, Harry nodded.

“Well. There have been a few boys, on occasion, who think that they are entitled to certain things from me. They are wrong. But this one night, someone who was supposed to be a friend, a Slytherin in our year, took me by surprise. I won’t tell you who, because it’s uncouth to speak ill of the dead.” Eyebrow raised, she flashed him a pointed look.

Crabbe. It had to be. Harry remembered the hulking, stupid brute, massive compared to Pansy’s delicate frame, and winced. Not someone it would have been easy for her to fight off.

“Anyway, we were in the library one night. He pinned me in one of the aisles and put his hands on me. I told him no. I tried to shove him off. But…he was just going to take what he wanted. He was supposed to be my friend! I froze. I wanted to cry. And you know, three different people walked by and saw us? Three people walked past and saw what was happening. But none of them stopped because…” She smiled, cold and cutting. “I’m the Whore of Hogwarts. They saw what they expected to see: Pansy Parkinson, letting a bloke cop a feel in the middle of the library. What a slut!”

Harry listened and itched to reach out to her. He didn’t. He let her talk.

“Not Colin, though. He saw past my reputation to what was actually happening. I was in trouble. I needed help. It didn’t matter that the bloke was three times his size, or that the girl was a Slytherin he was supposed to dislike. He just swooped in! And then, of course, old so-and-so turned on him and began to beat him to a pulp…” She rolled her eyes. “But it was enough to unfreeze me. He saw me clearly in that moment, when no one else did, and it was enough to bring me back to the fight. I hexed what’s-his-name halfway to hell. And then, Colin, my hero, lying on the floor with his eye swollen shut, blood pouring down his face, and his two front teeth in his hand, looked up at me like I was some sort of princess and asked if I was alright.” Pansy laughed to herself, and Harry smiled too. “Not exactly the most traditional knight in shining armor! But then, I’m not exactly the most traditional princess. I had to practically carry him to the hospital wing. We were friends, after that. And then more. He never tried to save me from my sexuality, or shame me for it. He saw me clearly, and he liked what he saw. I miss him a lot.”

While she sniffled and avoided eye contact, Harry walked to her and wrapped both arms around her. She leaned her head against him and stayed that way for a long, still moment.

By the time they parted, Harry knew beyond a doubt that Pansy Parkinson was his friend. Within the space of two hours, she had used those long red fingernails and a uniquely Slytherin brand of cutting charm to claw her way into his inner circle. He adored her, and he suspected the feeling was mutual. After all, there are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and a night of sex photos and streaking certainly qualified.

 

**_February 14 th – A Gift for Draco_ **

 

“So.” Hermione latched onto Harry’s arm the second he emerged from the boys’ dormitory on the morning on Valentine’s Day. “Did you figure something out? Did you get him a gift?”

“I did.” That was one thing he hadn’t considered, in the midst of all of the planning: what was he going to tell Hermione? Although, with what he had learned from Ron, she probably wouldn’t be fazed.

“Well?” Impatient, she tugged on his arm and paid no attention when Ron joined them. “What did you get him?”

“Exactly what you suggested.” He leaned in close and whispered, “I got him a dog!”

“You did not!” Excitement and shock had Hermione practically bouncing. “Is it a beagle? Harry, did you really?”

“No. Of course not.” Harry laughed as she deflated and glared at him. “Where the hell would we keep a dog at Hogwarts?”

As the three of them made their way down to the Great Hall for breakfast, Ron asked, “Did you go through with it?”

This only served to infuriate Hermione, who despised knowing less than someone else in any circumstance. “Go through with what?”

Harry nodded and flashed Ron a sheepish smile.

“With what? Harry, what did you go through with?”

Ron raised an eyebrow. “How’d they turn out?”

“Pretty good, I think?” Pansy had gone over the proofs with him the day before and helped him select the best ones. He had a stack of six photos, the best of the best, printed and at the ready. And they looked good. He didn’t have a lot to go by, but he thought the photos were pretty damn nice, if he did say so himself. He only hoped Draco liked them. “They turned out alright.”

Hermione stopped dead in her tracks. Ron and Harry kept going a few more steps before they realized she wasn’t with them. Hair frizzing out with electric madness, Hermione stood planted in the hallway, her hands on her hips and a battle-hardness on her face. “Why are you two keeping things from me? This was originally my plan, after all! Harry, what did you get for Malfoy?”

He and Ron shared an amused glance. It was easy to rile her up.

“Remember how a bunch of the books we found suggested public nudity?” Harry asked. “I did that. And took photos.”

A hard, slow blink widened Hermione’s eyes to comic proportions. “Naked photos? _You_ took naked…Harry!” She grinned and whispered, “Can I see them?”

“No, you can’t see them!” Harry shouted, at the same moment that Ron burst out laughing and said, scandalized, “Hermione!”

With both of his best friends laughing and bracing him, Harry walked into the Great Hall feeling confident, excited, and ready for the challenge he’d set for himself. The hall was a sight, decked out like it was for all holidays. From the ceiling, thousands of little pink hearts floated like gentle snow, but disappeared before reaching the heads of the students. It was sickeningly cute and reminded him, unpleasantly, of his disastrous date with Cho Chang at Madam Puddifoot’s. That was an awful Valentine’s Day. This one would be better. This one would be great!

Luna and Ginny sat together at the Gryffindor table, waiting for the rest of their friends, as they did every morning. But as he approached the table, a blond head came into view beside Luna. Draco was with them. Harry smiled to himself. Draco usually joined him for lunch, not breakfast. As he sat down on the bench, he pressed a kiss to Draco’s temple. “Hi! What are you doing here?”

“Do I need an excuse to share a meal with my boyfriend?” Draco asked, droll and mocking, but with no bite to it. A bowl of porridge sat on the table before him, barely touched, and Draco fiddled with his spoon. “Or, pardon me. I didn’t know I needed an appointment to meet with the famous Harry Potter!”

“Shut up, you git.” Harry elbowed him while Ginny laughed and their other friends all looked amused. “Actually, I was thinking maybe I could start having breakfast with you at the Slytherin table. Get to know your friends a bit better.”

“Oh.” His reaction was understated, well contained. “Alright. If that’s what you want.”

“Yeah. I do.” He loaded up his plate with eggs and toast. “I have a feeling Pansy and I are going to get along really well.”

Ron snorted, choked on a gulp of pumpkin juice, and sputtered through a hacking fit while Hermione glared and thumped him on the back. Thankfully, his display was enough of a diversion that Draco stared in polished judgement, one eyebrow raised, and completely missed Ginny duck her head under the table to get her laughter under control. “Alright there, Weasley?”

“Yeah!” Ron wheezed and coughed a bit more. “Sorry. Went down wrong.”

Draco nodded, but his petulant look insisted he was surrounded by peasants. Harry wasn’t sure whether he was more tempted to laugh along with his in-the-know friends, or to throw them in the lake for their complete lack of subtlety.

Throughout breakfast, Harry and Draco talked and smiled at each other, but Draco seemed distracted. Nervous. He barely touched his food. And he barely touched Harry, didn’t reciprocate any of the small brushes of hand or nudging Harry gave him. It made Harry nervous. Maybe it was the pressure of the holiday and the sappy decorations all around them giving Draco second thoughts about their relationship. Valentine’s Day was supposed to make people feel romantic. Could it have had the opposite effect on Draco? Maybe this day had only made his realize things weren’t going right and he wanted out.

Maybe—definitely—they should have talked before now. Damn it.

If that was what was going on in Draco’s head, then Harry’s plan would be wildly off-base. He needed to adjust, to know for sure. As they exited the Great Hall with their friends, Harry tugged Draco’s arm and held him back. He led him over to the same suit of armor he and Pansy had used as a hiding spot the other night, and that giddy freedom he’d felt two nights ago was a far cry from the shaky nerves he felt now. “Is everything alright?”

“Of course.” Draco brushed him off but didn’t look directly at him. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You seem a little off this morning, like you’re upset about something.” Harry forced the question out through his dry throat. It was the most direct he’d ever been in their relationship. “Did I do something wrong? Because I want to fix it, if I did.”

Draco’s gray eyes widened and he looked to Harry in horror. “No! Not at all! Far from it. I…” He scrunched his eyes shut and cut himself off.

The uncertainty and hesitation all over Draco’s face, in the tenseness of his posture, made Harry ache. Obviously, something was wrong. That Draco was scared to tell him about it…

Well, that was why they were going to talk today, wasn’t it? Harry had been holding back. They both had, for nerves and fear and unsure footing. No more. All of Harry’s worrying and plotting had started over sex, but he’d realized a deeper lacking in their relationship, one that he was determined to make right. He held onto Draco’s wrist. “You know you can talk to me, right? I know I haven’t been very good at talking about… _us_. But I want to be better at it. You can tell me anything.”

For a moment, Draco stood and stared at him, poised and frozen, a cat considering a pounce. His eyes were unreadable but intense. And then, in a rush, “Would you like to go to dinner with me tonight?”

Harry blinked a few times and watched as Draco forced himself to hold his chin up high and proud. “That’s what you’re worked up about? You were scared to ask me on a date?”

“Scared is dramatic.” Draco rolled his eyes, gave a snooty huff, and then rambled. “And only because of the holiday! Valentine’s Day is so saccharine and over-blown. It seems ridiculous to give in to the capitalistic posturing of a fake holiday, designed just to sell chocolates and contraceptives. Not to mention the darker side of the day! Love potions? Disgusting. More than a few people around here need to learn that Amortentia does not equal consent! Honestly, I don’t know why I even asked, why I even thought of it. It’s not something we need to partake in, unless, well--”

“I want to!” Giddy, warm happiness glowed through him while listening to Draco’s tirade. Draco wanted to go on a date with him—a proper, romantic date! That was something they hadn’t done yet. That felt real, like a real step, and very much like a sign that Draco wanted to move their relationship in the same direction Harry did. He interrupted the second he got ahold of his wits enough to stop smiling stupidly, a few of the dumb hearts from the decorations no doubt fluttering in his eyes.

“Oh.” Draco stopped short. His cheeks were pink and a thin lock of hair hung out of place on his forehead. Every part of him stilled. “Oh. I see. Well then.”

“It’s kind of a dumb holiday, but it would still be nice to go to dinner. Just the two of us.”

Good at hiding his emotions as Draco could be, no force on Earth could stop the tiny, pleased little smile that tugged across his mouth and betrayed his happiness. “Yes. I think so, too.”

“Good.” Harry grinned. “That was what had you in such a state? Draco Malfoy’s scared to ask his own boyfriend out on a date?”

Draco shrugged and looked down. “I wasn’t sure if we do that sort of thing. If we’re that sort of couple.”

He wasn’t sure if they were serious enough to date properly. He wasn’t sure if, when he asked, Harry might decide he’d had enough fun and wanted to jump ship before things got more involved.

Both of them were idiots.

“I guess we haven’t been that sort of couple so far,” Harry agreed. “Mostly, we spend time with a group of friends. And when we’re alone, we’re snogging.”

Draco smiled and nodded.

Harry plunged forward, finally ready to face this relationship head on, to dive into it and learn it and enjoy it. He wanted this, and nothing but his own fear could break it. Time to be brave. “But I want us to be that sort of couple. The sort who goes on dates and spends Valentine’s Day together.”

It took him a second, but Draco lifted his head to meet Harry’s gaze, clear-eyed and steady. “As do I.”

Both held each other’s eyes for a long moment that grew soft and full with new tenderness, new promise. Matching smiles shone on their faces. Draco had never looked more gorgeous to him, and he was looking back like he felt the same about Harry.

Perfect, that they should get their shit together just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Harry nudged Draco on the shoulder and shot him a sneaky, silly look. “I got you a gift, you know. For dumb Valentine’s Day. You weren’t the only one thinking about it.”

“A gift?” Draco’s interest was immediately piqued. With him and gifts, there was never a second of posturing, or an insistence of _you didn’t have to do that_. No, he knew what he liked, and he liked to be spoiled a bit. Harry found it terribly endearing. “What sort of gift? Can I have it?”

“Later! I’ll give it to you later.” Harry laughed and rubbed at the back of his neck, nervous but excited. “It’s not much. But I wanted to give you something to show you that I trust you and care about you, and that I want to talk about things. Future things. I hope you like it. I think you will.”

Draco peered at him, unabashedly interested and skeptical. “I can’t even have a hint?”

Harry rolled his eyes. “It’s a dog.”

“WHAT?!” The shout echoed through the castle, probably all the way up to the top towers, and Harry shrank away. Draco danced back and forth from foot to foot, beaming a wild, sharp-toothed grin. “Potter, really? A dog! Really?”

“I…” Oh no! That joke did not go as planned! Dammit, it looked like Hermione was right again! Apparently a dog really would have worked as a gift for Draco. He hadn’t thought of Draco as much of a dog sort of person. Amused and rueful, he shook his head. “No. Sorry! I was just teasing…”

If looks could kill, the one Draco shot would have dismembered him. “What the fuck, Potter! How dare you? Trick me into loving a precious little pup and then rip it so cruelly away.”

Laughing, happy, wildly at ease, Harry threw his arm around Draco’s shoulders and tugged him along to class. “Would you really have wanted a dog? You don’t strike me as a dog person.”

“I’m terribly misanthropic, Harry. I like animals more than I like most people.”

“Well, now I know. And I have some ideas for your birthday and Christmas.”

“So what is this gift, actually?” Draco needled him, begging and pouting for hints the whole way up to Charms class. When Harry refused to budge, smirking all the while, Draco huffed. “Well, it better be good. You’ve set my expectations high.”

Harry grinned. Oh, the gift would not be anything Draco was expecting, that was for sure. And he wouldn’t have to wait long, because Harry had snuck the first of the photographs into Draco’s Charms textbook.

With some help. As they hurried to their seats, just managing to make it in time, Pansy eyed Harry and gave him a long-lashed wink.

“Settle in, class! Settle in!” Professor Flitwick’s squeaky voice greeted them from the front of the room. “Mr. Potter, Mr. Malfoy, nice of you to join us.”

Harry flashed an apologetic smile and pulled out his textbook and quill. Beside him, Draco did the same.

“Let’s get started, shall we?” Flitwick clapped his hands. “Open your books to page one hundred and sixty-eight.”

All around them, pages rustled as the class flipped open the heavy hardcover tomes and searched for the right page. The page number, Harry had already memorized. It was in the syllabus, so he had known exactly which pages to slip the photograph between. His heart thundered in his chest as Draco moved beside him, flipping pages with deliberate flicks of his fingers.

Harry felt the exact moment Draco found the photo.

The rest of the class shifted and moved all around him, but beside him Draco shocked perfectly still. Slowly, one of his pale hands lifted to pick up the photo by its corner. As he studied it, fully realized what the image showed, he yanked it to his body and protected it from view under the desk. When he looked to Harry for an explanation, his cheeks flushed pink and his eyes were wide.

Harry said nothing, only glanced down and nodded towards the photo in Draco’s lap. With a lift of his brow, he let Draco know it was alright to look. _“Go on,”_ he mouthed silently, and then turned back to focus on the front of the room.

It was a challenge. He forced his eyes forward, ducked his head down, and bit the insides of his cheeks to keep from smirking. Beside him, timid but terribly curious, Draco inched the photo out from under the desk and stared furtively down at it, his eyes constantly darting up to the chalkboard to avoid suspicion. Harry couldn’t see his face full on, but he swore Draco’s breathing quickened and hitched.

Honestly! All that, for the first photo? Harry struggled not to laugh. It was hardly titillating at all, just one of the images of him flirting with the camera and tugging off his tie. He was fully clothed, for Merlin’s sake! But Draco was all worked up over it, treating the little sneak peek as precious contraband.

“Something interesting, Mr. Malfoy?” Draco, swept up and utterly carried away by a glimpse of his boyfriend’s collar bones, was disastrously unsubtle in his study of the photo. He jolted like he’d been zapped with a stinging hex when Flitwick called him out. “Care to share with the rest of the class?”

“No!” Draco squeaked, but then cleared his throat. “No, I’d rather…”

While Flitwick stared with eyes narrowed, clearly perturbed, Harry swooped to the rescue. Thank goodness for the privacy charms, although he hadn’t suspected Draco would be so easily excited that they’d have need of them immediately, the lovely idiot. He snatched the photo from Draco, who panicked and tried to grab it back. “It’s nothing, Professor! Just a photo that fell out of Draco’s textbook.”

He passed it to Flitwick, who took it for inspection. “A photo of Professor Hagrid’s pumpkin patch. Lovely. Although I hardly understand your blushing, Mr. Mal—oh.” He stopped short.

Oh no.

Flitwick knew.

All of the blood in Harry’s body rushed to his face and burned it hot and embarrassed. He couldn’t see the image, Harry knew, because there was no way he could see through the charm without some serious spell-hacking. He and Pansy had worked on the privacy charms together, and there was no way he could see through them! But Flitwick’s flustered look as he handed it back to Draco showed he had very strong suspicions about what was actually on the photograph.

One of his teachers knew he had taken naked photos. Fan-fucking-tastic.

Both of them blushing, although Draco much more dramatically than their professor, Flitwick said gingerly, “Enjoy your Valentine’s Day, Mr. Malfoy.”

Draco managed to choke out, “Thank you, sir.”

“And Mr. Potter.” Flitwick pinned Harry with a knowing look. “Glad to see you were paying attention to our lesson on advanced privacy charms.”

Harry closed his eyes and tried not to burst into flames. This was not how this was supposed to go! Dammit, Draco! For someone so good at covering his emotions, he had gotten awfully ruffled over a tiny bit of skin! The sardonic, wry humor that overtook him in that moment forced him to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. He nodded at Professor Flitwick. “Learned from the best, sir.”

“You did, and thank Merlin for that.” With that, he left it alone and trudged back up to the front of the room, a little less spring in his step than normal.

While his back was turned, Pansy, Ron, and Hermione all silently laughed at Harry. Pansy rolled her eyes, grinned, and mouthed, _“Smooth, Potter.”_

A few minutes later, after Draco had faded from phoenix to flamingo colored, he scribbled on a piece of parchment and passed it to Harry.

The note said: _What the fuck was that, Potter?_

Harry smirked, kept his eyes on the front of the classroom, and wrote back, _Your Valentine’s Day gift!_

Draco dropped his quill and fully stared at Harry, desperate for a more satisfactory explanation. Harry cut him a break and wrote out a longer message: _I wanted to give you something to show I trust you and I’m ready to take things to the next level. So I took some photos for you! The rest of them are much more explicit than this first one. I would like to share them with you, but I understand if you’re not ready for that. I can hold off and give them to you another time, if you’d like. Or go ahead with them today. Would you like to see the rest?_

Rigid and careful, Draco took his sweet time reading, but once he picked up his quill the response was sure. He passed the note back to Harry.

_OBVIOUSLY, yes._ All caps. Underlined three times.

Harry grinned to himself and then to Draco. He nodded.

For the next fifteen minutes, Draco kept nudging him, shooting him looks, and passing him notes. _Come on, Potter! Where is the rest of my gift?_

Until Harry finally hissed at him, “Be patient!”

Grumpy, Draco huffed but fell silent. He slipped Harry one more note. _Tyrant._

_Eager, are you?_ Harry smirked as he wrote back.

Eyes unblinking and sincere, Draco nodded. He didn’t complain for the rest of class.

Out in the halls, as they walked to their next class of the day, Ron and Hermione couldn’t help themselves. Ron barely contained his laughter as he said, “So, Malfoy. Nice picture of Hagrid’s pumpkin patch, huh?”

Draco glared at him, and then at Harry. “Do they know?” A scandalized look drew his face into comic surprise. “Harry, who exactly took the photos?”

“Shh…Don’t worry about it. Just some tart with a camera.” Harry grimaced as he shushed him and petted his arm. “On a completely unrelated note, Pansy and I are best friends now.”

Ron and Hermione cackled, but Pansy took that as her cue. With sharp elbows, she wedged herself in between Harry and Draco and threw her arms around their shoulders. She pressed a loud, smacking kiss to Draco’s cheek, and then a similar one to Harry’s.

That was going to leave a lipstick print. A bright red one.

Confused, bordering on bewildered, Draco blinked and looked back and forth from Harry to Pansy. Then, his face softened into something terribly sappy and he looked away.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, boys!” She cooed over her shoulder as she left them and hurried on to class.

Draco said nothing, but leaned into Harry’s side. It said what needed to be said. After a few months of hesitating, Harry had reached out to Draco’s best friend and resolved their lingering differences.

Warm and tender, Harry smiled and leaned back against Draco while they walked, their hands linked tight. He’d wanted to give Draco something to show his commitment. Befriending Pansy maybe have been an even better gift than the photos.

Not that Draco would give up the photos for anything, once they got going. Throughout the rest of the day, Harry’s plan went off smoothly. In each class, Draco flipped open his book or unrolled parchment to find the next photo, each progressively more explicit than the last. And despite the increasing heat of each photo, he controlled himself significantly better than he had with the first, tamest one.

In Defense Against the Dark Arts, Draco tensed when he found photos two and three: of Harry undressing, and of him palming himself through his boxers, respectively. Eyes glazed, Draco stared at both of them for a long while, and watched them loop through the moments of captured motion a least half a dozen times each before he turned to Harry. He whispered, “Holy shit.”

Harry grinned and ducked his head down. On a scrap of parchment, he wrote, _Like them?_

_Yes._

That was evident. Harry didn’t need to be told, but wanted to hear it anyway.

Draco wrote another note: _Are there more photos? Do they get more explicit than this?_

Surreptitiously, Harry watched Draco’s response when he nodded.

It was worth the possible detection, and thereby detention, to stare. Draco gulped and looked away, a tiny, dazed smile all over his face. He said nothing more, but took a lot of deep breaths and wiggled around in his seat for the rest of class.

The fourth photo came during lunch. In the middle of Ginny and Ron arguing about the latest Cannons match, a school owl swooped in low over the table and dropped a red envelope on Draco’s plate.

As he brushed crumbs off it, he glanced at Harry in question. Harry nodded.

Thankfully, Draco had gotten his reactions well enough under control to avoid drawing much attention to himself. It was with great effort that Draco did not react outwardly to photo number four. Harry was particularly proud of this one, if he did say so himself. Pansy had taken it from above, looking down his body as he lay on the bed, and the lighting made him look soft and hungry and romantic. A sheet wrapped between his legs covered his cock, and the loop of motion showed his hand sliding down under the fabric.

For a second, Draco stopped breathing. Tense, rigidly upright, he stared at the photo for five loops, and then promptly slipped it into his bag. Only a slight pink tinge to his cheeks betrayed him.

“What did you get, Malfoy?” Hermione asked, although she knew the answer full well. “Something nice?”

“Yes. Very nice.” Draco’s response was prim and polite, but the tiniest tremor quaked in his voice. “Just a Valentine’s card. From Harry.”

Thankfully, Ron didn’t notice.

Their next class was Herbology, which didn’t use a textbook. At first, Harry had trouble coming up with where to hide the picture, but Pansy helped him figure it out. Draco found the fifth picture tucked down inside his work gloves. Harry busied himself with prepping their station, but he braced himself. This one was a doozy.

Draco apparently thought so too, because he couldn’t hold in a strangled, half-choked gasp. He coughed, hid the picture from view, and grinned at Harry. “You kinky bastard.”

Harry kept his voice to a murmur. “Did you get a good look at that one?”

Draco bit his smile in tight and glanced around before he lifted the picture for a better look. This was one of the ones Pansy had snapped of Harry laying on his stomach, right around the time he lost his mind to his erection. The loop showed Harry—head thrown back, pupils blown wide with lust, tongue peeking out—as he rolled his hips to rut against the bed. His arse front and center, the angle was just right to see a hint of his bollocks when he lifted up.

He looked utterly debauched in the picture, and Draco looked utterly lost as he stared at it. Under his breath, Draco muttered, “Jesus, Merlin, Morgana, and Hades.” Mixing up pantheons and mythologies was a good indication that Draco was reaching a boiling point with this, as was the way he discreetly adjusted his robes. “Are you trying to kill me, Potter?”

“Of course not.” He passed Draco an empty terracotta pot and positioned a sack of soil in between them. He blinked and feigned innocence. “Why? Don’t you like your gift?”

Draco ignored him. “How many more are there?”

“One more.”

“Better than this one?” He sounded almost giddy, like he could scarcely believe his luck.

Harry just laughed and got on with his Herbology work.

Going into their last class of the day, Potions, Draco was trembling with pent up nerves and excitement. Harry could feel the tension vibrating off of him the whole walk down to the dungeons. He was a bit nervous himself. When Professor Slughorn gave them their instructions and set the class loose to begin brewing, Draco turned and looked at Harry expectantly.

Harry was ready for it. He handed Draco the final photograph, sent as much emotion as he could through a fond, longing smile, and then walked to the supply cupboards. He gathered up ingredients for both of them. By the time he returned, Draco hadn’t moved. He stared down at the photograph, eyes blown and unblinking, lips parted. His breath panted in shaky, staccato bursts.

He jumped when Harry touched him, but then pressed back into the firm presence of Harry’s hand between his shoulder blades. “Alright?”

The sixth picture was one of the last ones Pansy had taken, with Harry on his back, fully exposed, pulling at his cock in long, slow jerks while staring at the camera. At Draco.

After a long breath, Draco nodded and looked at Harry with a pinched, pained expression. He held Harry’s gaze, intense and on fire, as he reached down and desperately, discretely pressed the heel of his hand against his crotch. Harry’s own breath caught as he watched. With the other hand, Draco slipped the final photograph into the pocket of his robes.

And then he left.

Just…left. Left Harry standing at their shared table, blinking stupidly at the cauldron.

But as he walked out the classroom door, Draco asked, “Professor? May I run to the loo?”

Slughorn waved him off, and Draco disappeared.

Harry fought to hide his glee. Oh my God. He had done it. He had broken Draco Malfoy!

Always considerate, Harry sliced bat spleens and crushed rose hips, and he smirked to himself all the while because his boyfriend had snuck off to the loo to wank over a dirty picture of him.

What a day!

When Draco returned a few minutes later, he looked a little rumpled, but calmer. Harry whispered to him, “Feel better?”

“Marginally.” Draco nudged him and took over the next step in the potion and stirred ingredients together.

In a burst of bravery and cheek, which he couldn’t have managed before seeing Draco’s reactions today, he suggested, “Maybe you’ll feel a little more satisfied after our date tonight.”

The ladle slipped from Draco’s hand and clanged against the side of the cauldron.

Oh, this was good. Harry loved this. Draco was so damn pretty when he was turned on. How could he have known that cool, cocky Draco Malfoy was so fluttery and easy to fluster? Why had he not made a move sooner? He’d been scared, hoping Draco would start something, but now, on the other side of it, he took enormous delight in getting Draco worked up and thinking about him—in being honest and upfront about what he wanted. It felt good to initiate it, and to see Draco react.

As Draco righted himself, he looked at Harry, a hundred thoughts visible on his face. “Am I to take it that this means…” He cleared his throat. “I know you said you wanted to take things slow. Is this your unorthodox way of showing me…”

Harry nodded. This was it: the thing he’d worked himself into such a bumbling, petrified state over, the thing he’d been unable to say for weeks, the reason for this whole charade. When the moment came, it was far easier than he’d imagined. Harry felt absolutely settled, calm, and sure, when he said, “Yes. Thank you for respecting my boundaries. This is my way of telling you that my boundaries have changed, and I would like to have sex with you.”

Draco’s eyes widened a little and he nodded, his expression somewhere between shocked and serene. “How does tonight sound? Does that work for you?”

“Yeah. Sounds great.” Harry snorted a laugh. “I’ll add it to my schedule.”

“Git.” Draco’s smile was sweet and hopeful, tentative and excited.

“I’d like to talk first, though.” With some effort, Harry picked up his mortar and continued prepping ingredients while he bared himself, maybe even more fully than he had done in the photographs. “About that, and about us. To make sure we’re on the same page. I think we’ve had some trouble communicating, and I want to make sure you know how much I care about you.”

“I would like that.” Their hands brushed as Draco reached for a vial of snake venom. “At dinner?”

“That sounds perfect.”

They worked in easy but charged silence, the excitement of the day and the night to come rich and crackling between them. As Draco stirred the milky-blue potion six times clockwise, he said, “I made a reservation, by the way. For dinner. At a proper restaurant.”

“Did you?”

He looked quite pleased with himself. “Wear something nice.”

* * *

As Harry sipped a glass of red wine—not something he’d ever expected to like, but it was alright, he supposed—Draco couldn’t stop staring at him from across the table. One of his fingers traced patterns on the white linen tablecloth, nervous little figure-eights, “Is this alright?”

Draco asked for the third time.

“Yes. It’s perfect.” Harry grabbed his hand and twisted their fingers together beside the little crystal vase with red rosebuds at the table’s center. Candlelight glowed warm and soft around them, and a violin played distant, soothing music. “This is really nice. I’ve never been anywhere like this before.”

Prim, Draco nodded, seemingly satisfied with the answer. They sat together in the intimate little restaurant, a new addition to Hogsmeade, and swelled with promise and anticipation, a heady desire to do things right. Draco looked Harry up and down. “I like your shirt. Looks nice on you.”

“Thanks.” Hermione had taken time out of preparations for her own Valentine’s date to transfigure him something to wear, after he’d deemed his entire frumpy old wardrobe entirely unsuitable. In a green button-up shirt and a black sport coat, he looked passable, maybe even nice. Draco, in a blue shirt and gray waistcoat, looked gorgeous and Harry told him so.

A few seconds of quiet, of intense eye contact, of twined hands, and then Draco asked quietly, “You wanted to talk?”

“Yes. Right.” Now that they were here, Harry’s confidence and surety didn’t slip, but his words jumbled. “Well, let’s start with the pictures. Did you enjoy your gift?”

Draco gulped his wine. “Very much so. Yes. Although, I’d like to know why you felt like they were necessary.”

A sip of his own drink braced him, and he dove into the explanation of how he felt lost, unsure, wanting Draco to make the first move with sex and scared to do it himself. “It felt selfish, somehow. I thought I was sending you signals that I was ready for more, so when nothing happened, I was scared you didn’t want me like that. It would be selfish to demand more from you,” he said. As he spoke, Draco listened and nodded along, giving him space to say what he needed to say. “I know that’s not right. But wanting anything for myself feels kind of selfish.”

“Because of the war?” Draco asked.

“Yes. And also because of my childhood.” Draco didn’t know much about his time with the Dursleys at all. It wasn’t something Harry liked to dwell on or talk about, even though he was realizing more and more how much it had affected him. They would talk about it, Harry resolved. Not tonight. But someday, maybe soon, he would tell Draco about the cupboard and his spiders and everything else. More than anything, he wanted to know Draco, and to be known by him in return. “I’ve never really been allowed to want anything for myself. I don’t know how to do it, sometimes, and I was scared it would drive you away. But more than that, I was scared that if I acknowledged out loud how much I want you and want to be with you…something bad would happen.”

Draco squeezed his hand tighter. “Harry, what bad do you think is going to happen?”

“Nothing!” It was hard to explain. He struggled with the words for a moment. “Maybe people won’t like us being together, or the press will harass us. Something, I guess. But it was just a nasty, bad feeling. So many times, when I wanted something, it got taken away or used against me. I was scared to name what was happening between us, to let it go further, because I had an awful feeling that wanting it so much would break it. Does that make sense?”

Draco looked thoughtful when he nodded. “It does. But you know now that the war is over. You’re safe. Nothing is coming to break us apart. And…well. If anything ever does try…” Draco leaned in close and smirked at him, a wicked gleam in his eye. “I’m a much bigger bitch than anything else you’ve ever wanted, and anyone who tried to break us would quickly learn.”

That was true, and the reminder helped. They were in this together.

They laughed and smiled promises to each other, and then broke apart when the waiter brought their food.

A few bites of dinner calmed the intensity of the conversation. Draco declared the scallops divine and insisted Harry taste a bite, and then Harry felt it was only appropriate to offer Draco some of his pasta. Satisfied and comfortable, Harry picked the conversation back up. “So the photos!”

A blush lit Draco’s cheeks at the mention of them, but he nodded for Harry to continue.

“The photos came about because I was nervous to talk to you about all of this, and because I feel like I haven’t been a great boyfriend to you so far. I’ve been holding back, for all those reasons. I wanted to give you a gift that would show you very clearly that I’m serious about you and want us to talk about sex, and the future, and everything else.” Harry nodded. “Yeah. That’s where I am. How are you feeling?”

“I…” Draco paused and looked delicately down at his half-finished dinner plate. Bluntly, he announced, “I’m obsessed with you.”

“Oh.” A rush of happiness surged through Harry. Although he rationally knew it wasn’t the case, after worrying that Draco didn’t want him, he was relieved to hear it out loud. “That’s great!”

“Yes. Well.” Draco dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “You’re not the only one of us who has been holding back. I’ve been doing the same.”

“I could feel that, yeah.”

While Draco took some time to collect his thoughts, Harry ate a few more bites of his dinner, which really was delicious. He didn’t think of himself as a _nice restaurant_ sort of bloke, but he could get used to going to places like this with Draco.

“The way I feel for you, Harry…I was worried you would be scared off by the intensity of it. I can be a very intense person.”

Harry gripped his hand and smiled. “I know this about you. And I can be pretty intense, too.”

“True,” Draco conceded. “That first night, when you asked to take things slow, I was so scared I was going to mess everything up. I didn’t want to push you. I didn’t want to be too much for you. During the war, I had a lot of my free will stripped from me. I wasn’t allowed to make many of my own decisions, and many people ignored and gleefully trampled right over my boundaries.” Quickly, eyes sharp, he added, “Not sexually. Nothing like that. But other boundaries. After what I went through, I was very conscious of the boundary you set, and the dynamics between us. I didn’t want to push you or pressure you in any way.”

“And I really appreciate that!” Harry said. “I know I was being foolish, not talking to you, expecting you to just read my mind. I appreciate that you’ve been so patient.”

“That’s just basic decency, I think,” Draco huffed and rolled his eyes. “But I think my fear of pushing you, of overwhelming you got overzealous, and made me a bit foolish too. I was scared to even talk to you about any of this. It felt like you weren’t ready to fully trust me, and I was desperate to earn that trust from you.” 

It was what Pansy had told him, what he had suspected. It still made him sad to hear. “I’ve trusted you all along. It was never you.”

“I understand now. Especially after your gift. As protective of your private life as you are, you never would have given me photos like that if you didn’t trust me.”

Harry nodded and gave Draco a chance to eat the last few bites of his meal. “So what happens now?”

“Now?” Draco finished chewing and sat his napkin down on the table. “Now we fuck, Potter.”

“I meant in the relationship, you horny bastard!” Harry laughed, but the calm assurance of what would soon happen made his pants squeeze too tight.

“Oh, I’m the horny bastard? That’s rich. You’re the one who apparently does pornographic photo shoots in his spare time!” Draco grinned, but then said, “In the relationship? We both agree that we’re all in. So that means we talk more. Talk to each other about problems, and about things we want. Trust each other. Go on dates.”

Harry nodded along. “And maybe we start thinking about where we’re going to live after Hogwarts?”

One of Draco’s eyebrows lifted. “You want to live together?”

“I want to start thinking about it and talking about it as a possibility.”

“Alright. That’s fine by me, Harry. As I said, I’m obsessed with you. But for now?” He leaned in and whispered, “I suggest we go see if we can get a room at the Hogshead for the night.”

It was all Harry could do to refrain from tackling the waiter and demanding the check immediately.

A giggly, whirlwind fifteen minutes later, and they were unlocking the door to their room for the night. Briefly, Harry wondered if he should worry about curfew? But no, his friends would cover for them if necessary. For tonight, Harry and Draco would have nothing to worry about but each other.

The rough wooden door creaked loudly, and Draco nudged him in and lit the lamps. It was dingy, old, and barebones. Worn patches on the planks of the floor collected dust, and the bed looked serviceable, but like it had seen better decades. Overhead, the thatched roof and wide, oak ceiling beams sagged and warped. Draco took in the rustic conditions, and announced, “This is perfect.”

Harry locked the door and cast privacy charms.

And then they were well and truly alone.

Every feeling, every promise that had grown between them for months, years, flung out wings and soared around them, filling the room with dizzying, heady anticipation. They stared at each other and remembered how to breathe.

“Before we do anything,” Harry said, his voice a bare whisper, “I want us to promise that we’ll talk. The whole way through. Is that alright?”

“Yes,” Draco rushed to agree. “Yes, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Good.” With a shaky laugh, Harry asked, “Now what?”

Wild, joyous, as if it were the best thing in the world, Draco said, “I have no idea!”

Harry grinned. “Me either!”

A pull brought them close together, and they kissed, soft and slow. Against his lips, Draco asked, “What do you want?”

“Everything.” While Harry pressed kisses along Draco’s jawline, he murmured, “I want you to fuck me.”

“I can do that.” Draco’s sure, practical tone made Harry laugh again. “I can definitely do that.”

“Can you? Are you quite certain?”

“Absolutely.” Draco nodded, prim and proper, more in the mode of business associate than romantic partner. “How hard can it be?”

Harry couldn’t help it, he wheezed laughter and soon had Draco joining him. “Shut up, Potter! I’m getting you naked now!”

“Fine! Then I’m getting you naked back!”

“Not if I do you first!”

“You’re on, Malfoy!”

In a flurry of fists and shoving, they grabbed at each other’s clothes and tore at buttons in a race to strip the other first. It was a laughing, tangled mess, more a vicious wresting match than a seductive strip tease. They both fought hard. Draco fought dirty.

“Shit! Potter! You fucking imbecile, don’t rip my fucking shirt!”

“Ow! Stop pulling my hair, you brat!”

“Ha! Got your belt! I’m winning!”

“Only because you fucking kicked me, you bony little--” A hard, biting kiss shut Harry up, and he moaned into Draco’s mouth while they tugged at each other’s trousers.

When the last bits of their clothing were ripped off and thrown to the floor, they tumbled to the bed, naked and kissing and achingly hard.

Every inch of Draco’s skin burned hot against Harry’s while they attacked each other with kisses, from their twisted, tangling legs, to their chests pressed flush, and especially their cocks. Oh, fuck, he could die from the silky hard rub of Draco’s cock against his own. That brush, that tease of pressure was enough to drive him mad with longing, with desire, with want. Harry groaned and chased the feeling, needing more of it, because, for the first time, he and Draco were perfectly in sync, perfectly communicating, and it all felt so right. In one move, he flipped onto his back and wrapped a leg around Draco’s waist to pull him into place on top.

Wet, messy, desperate kisses, all tongue and teeth and open mouth drove them harder against each other, and Draco rocked his hips as Harry thrust up to meet him. “Oh, fuck!”

He wasn’t going to last.

He didn’t care.

Draco’s hands were all over him, one of them slipping down between their fevered bodies, and he did not fucking care. That hand touched him, gripped him, and it was everything Harry had hoped for. Draco’s hands were divine. It was strange and new and brilliant, and even more so when Draco squeezed both of their dicks together in a wide fist and gave them something to fuck against.

Harry’s jaw went slack and his hips jerked, blindly chasing every drop of pleasure Draco was giving him. And with Draco meeting him thrust for thrust, moaning and panting into his mouth, dripping sweat onto his forehead, flushing pink with passion and exertion, it all built and built and built and…

“Oh fuck, Draco!”

As his orgasm exploded from him, rocking his body rigid, Draco whined and gasped, “Harry!” Hot, thick come, his own and then Draco’s, splattered across his stomach.

It was over just as suddenly as it began.

Shaky and spinning, Harry sank down deeper into the mattress while Draco kneeled above him.

He was gorgeous, a perfect, glowing beam of moonlight in the dingy room. With all the fighting and the rush, Harry hadn’t gotten a good look yet. While they both panted and recovered, Harry stared in wide-eyed wonder at Draco’s body: his long, thin limbs; creamy white skin, pale enough to hint the snaking lines of purple-blue veins; fine blond hair on his chest and legs; and his long, slender cock, swollen pink and dripping.

And then, he stared a while at the face he adored: the sharp nose and pointy chin, the high forehead, the silvery eyes and lush, kissable mouth.

“You are so beautiful,” Harry murmured. He felt a bit like he was drunk.

Draco’s eyes jerked up from his own slow mapping of Harry’s body, over the scrawny chest and warped scars, and he stared with obvious emotion. “So are you.”

When Harry reached out a heavy, tired hand, Draco crawled forward and collapsed. Snuggled together, naked, side-by-side, as their come cooled on his skin, Harry slowly emerged from his daze. When the reality hit him, he chuckled from low and deep in his belly.

It shook Draco, who began to laugh too.

“Fuck, that was brilliant,” Harry announced.

“It was.” When Draco nodded, his fine hair tickled Harry’s chest.

“I liked that. We should do that again.”

“I concur. And I suggest we should do much more than that.” Matter-of-fact, Draco stated, “I suspect we’ll be very tired for our classes tomorrow.”

“Yes. Agreed. We have many things to do tonight!”

After Draco helped him clean up, they sat together in the bed, comfortable and free in their nakedness, and talked about nothing in particular. It was quiet and warm, the sky outside their window dark and cold with silver-white stars. Harry lit a fire in the room’s small, ashy hearth so they wouldn’t have to put their clothes back on.

“So,” Harry eventually asked. “Think you might be ready to go again?”

Draco nodded. “Should we try to properly penetrate you this time, instead of getting distracted and humping each other raw?”

“Yes! That would be delightful. I look forward to being properly penetrated by you.”

“Shut up, you git.”

When they kissed, it was less fevered but just as good. With slow, mounting tension, they kissed and licked into each other’s mouths. Draco sucked Harry’s tongue with a pull that ran all the way down his body, straight to his cock, which quickly rose for round two.

“Lie back?”

“Right. Yeah.” Harry did, and his heart thumped harder at the sight of Draco above him. He leaned over Harry and kissed his way down his throat and his chest, stopping to flick little kitten licks over his nipples that had Harry groaning.

“Like that?” Draco asked. When Harry nodded, he smiled and continued, sucking, kissing, and even nibbling at the sensitive spots. He moved down further, kissing all the while, and paused, poised and ready, with his lips parted over Harry’s cock. “Do you want me to…?”

“No,” Harry said through laughter. He did. Very, very much so, he wanted to feel Draco’s mouth on him. But he had something else in mind, and was determined to get to it. “I’d probably come in about three seconds if you did that.”

“Alright. Later, then.” Draco tossed him a coy smirk, and then moved lower to kiss and nudge open Harry’s thighs. Determined, Harry spread his legs to make room for him, and let Draco maneuver him into place. Tentative and careful, Draco traced one finger up and down his crack.

Harry gasped. That felt wildly different than he had expected!

“Alright?”

“Yeah.”

With a murmured spell, Draco slicked his fingers and stared down, appreciating and considering the serious task before him. They made eye contact and Harry nodded for him to continue, to get on with it already.

With unbearable slow, steady care, Draco worked one finger into Harry’s hole. He twisted and rocked it back and forth to wedge it inside the tight fit while Harry winced and breathed through it.

“How does that feel?”

“Strange. Not bad. Just…weird.”

“Try to relax. I won’t do anything but this for a while, yet.” The way Draco stared down at his hand, so intent, so serious, nearly made Harry laugh. It did help him relax, to see that pinched, tight grimace on Draco’s face, like he was staring down at a Potions exam instead of Harry arse hole. Draco was determined to do this right.

As Draco rocked his finger back and forth, as Harry relaxed more and more, the strangeness receded and it felt nice. Maybe even good.

“Let me know when I find it,” Draco said. With a quick glance up, he smiled at Harry. “I’ve only ever done this to myself, so I’m not entirely sure.”

“When you find what?” Harry laughed. “What are you searching for up my arse?”

“Your…?” Confused, Draco peered at him. “Your prostate? What else would I be searching for?”

“Oh, right.” He’d skimmed the section about that in the book, and Ron had mentioned it, too. Not something he knew much about, except that it was important. “I don’t know much about what that is or what it feels like.”

“You--?” Draco gaped, but then fortified his expression. “Hold on, I’ll find it.”

Harry winced, flinched and laughed a little when Draco crooked his finger and dug around in his arse, a man on a mission. He looked so serious! So intent! Harry couldn’t help but tease him. “Draco Malfoy! On the hunt for Harry Potter’s elusive pros—oh fuck!”

A wave of pleasure surged through his whole body, and for a second if felt like he was about to come. He didn’t, but as Draco rubbed his finger at that spot, the feeling lingered and rocked through him and he sank into it, moaning incoherently.

“Mmmhm.” Draco smirked. “Thought so.”

“Don’t look so smug,” Harry panted.

“I’m not smug!” But when Harry moaned and ground down on Draco’s finger, he amended, “Alright, I’m a little smug.”

“Stop being smug and put another finger in!”

With a second, and then a third finger, Draco worked and massaged Harry open until he was sweating and panting and begging for more. “I’m ready. Draco. I want to try it now.”

They sat up and kissed. Harry asked, “How do you want to do this? Should I get on my knees?”

“No. Uhh…”

“What?”

“Could you maybe ride me?”

“Ride you?” Harry laughed and punched Draco’s shoulder. “What, you want me to do all the work?”

“Sort of? Not because of that.” Concerned and honest, Draco confessed, “I’m scared I’m going to hurt you.”

“Oh.”

“That I’m going to get caught up in it, and I won’t be able to stop, even if it hurts you.”

“Draco.” Harry shook his head and tried not to laugh. “You’re not a cave man. You wouldn’t just…shove it in and start pounding!”

“Yes, but I’ve never done this! What if I get swept up in the passion of the moment?”

“The passion of the moment?” Harry shook his head and laughed.

Draco, flustered, argued further. “That’s how it always goes in books! The one on top always promises to go slow, but once it starts he gets swept up and says things like, _I have to move_! I don’t want to do that to you.”

He was nervous. Really, deeply nervous. It struck Harry, and he felt like a fool for not noticing it before now. All of Draco’s serious intensity, his business-like approach to foreplay, was born of nerves and uncertainty.

Harry found it terribly endearing, and wanted to do whatever he could to ease Draco’s nerves. He pressed their lips together in a long, sugary kiss.

“I don’t think you’re going to do that. I trust you,” Harry said as he pushed Draco back on the bed and kneeled over him, reminding himself to ask later what sort of books Draco was reading. “But if it makes you feel better, then fine, we can do it like this.”

A few strokes of Harry’s hand slicked Draco with lube and brought him back to full hardness. He straddled Draco’s hips. Lined himself up. Brought Draco’s cock up to nudge at his hole.

“Ready?”

Draco nodded, his eyes blazing and sweet as he stared up at Harry.

Nothing more to it, then. Harry sank down and slowly worked until the head of Draco’s cock popped past the ring of muscle. He was in. They were fucking.

It didn’t feel great, to be perfectly honest.

It hurt, burned and stretched him. It was a lot. A lot to take, a lot to get used to. Much different, much more intense than Draco’s fingers. Sweat popped along his hairline and on his chest. His erection wilted with the pain and effort. He grimaced, held his breath, and sank down a little lower.

It helped to rock his hips in little circular movements. Bit by bit, he took Draco in.

Throughout the whole, slow process, Draco did not move one single fucking muscle. Though he was distracted and focused on his own task, Harry braved a glance at Draco. He was silent and rigid, panting through his nose, his teeth gnawing at his bottom lip as he watched Harry.

A little further, another wince, and Harry bottomed out, fully seated on Draco’s cock.

He gasped for air. It still hurt. Burned. The fullness was strange.

“Are you alright?” Draco’s careful hands stroked his thighs.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I just need a minute.”

“Take all the time you need.”

Harry nodded, too labored to talk much, and closed his eyes. The pain began to fade a little. If only he could relax, the fullness might not feel so overwhelming. The muscles in his thighs quivered as he held himself up, and he drew in a few deep, steady breaths. Little by little, he felt it. His hole, clenched like a vice, relaxed and fluttered around Draco.

That was…oh. Alright. That was better. That was—

“Fuck! No, no, no, no!”

His eyes flew open just in time to see Draco, face red and drenched in sweat, clench his eyes shut and groan. Pleasure and pain rushed over his features.

A gush of hot fluid filled Harry’s hole.

Harry blinked. “Did you just…?”

“Fuck. Fuck, I am so sorry!”

It was awful and rude, and Harry couldn’t help it. He laughed. Loudly. It was just too damn perfect! They were a mess, and it was perfect! How could he have ever possibly thought, even for a second, that Draco didn’t want him? Draco was so into him, so turned on by him, that Harry could bring him to such a state without moving! “You didn’t move! I didn’t move! Draco, neither of us were moving! How did you come from that?”

“You’re so tight! You feel so—oh, forget it!” Draco threw both arms over his face and hid. Muffled, he said, “Get off me so I can go hide in the Forbidden Forest until the centaurs eat me and put me out of my misery.”

“No!” Still impaled, Harry leaned forward and smacked kisses onto Draco’s elbows. “You dramatic wanker! We just had sex for the first time! Get out here so I can kiss you properly, please?”

Draco peeked out from behind his arms and moped.

Harry kissed him.

Laughed.

Kissed him again.

And that cracked an embarrassed, scrunchy-nosed smile on Draco’s pink face.

It was the best thing Harry had ever seen in all his days. “I love you.”

“I…” Draco’s eyes widened. “Potter! You can’t say that right after I utterly fail at fucking you. I don’t want pity love!”

“It’s not pity love, you prat.” He rolled his eyes as he worked his way back up Draco’s shaft. It was easier getting it out that it had been getting it in. The head left him with a pop, and a gush of come dripped out of him. Oh, that was…unfortunate. Bizarre. Really unflattering. Harry refused to feel ashamed, and he refused to let Draco do so either. “And you didn’t fail at fucking me. We successfully lost our virginity to one another.”

Draco grumbled, “Yes, in all of twelve seconds, because I apparently have the stamina of a doxy.”

“It’s not your fault that I am a sex god and my arse is a magical gift, capable of bringing men to their knees.”

“Now who’s the smug one! Not content to simply be The Chosen One, and The Boy Who Lived? Fine.” He sat up and kissed Harry on one cheek. “You’re a sex god.” He kissed the other cheek. “Your arse is magical.” And then, finally, he kissed Harry on the mouth. It lingered sweetly, until Draco pulled back and cupped Harry’s face in his palm. “And I love you too.”

As they looked into each other’s eyes, Harry felt perfectly calm, happy, and seen. No panic. No nerves. No creeping worry that it would go wrong. This was everything he’d wanted, and the wanting glowed steady and sure within him.

Once they cleaned up, they laid down and held each other in loose, sure arms. They talked. Kissed. Grew tired.

When round three happened, with Harry on his back, full and moaning as Draco pushed into him with gentle thrusts, they kissed and whispered assurances of _yes_ , and _God_ , and _that’s perfect_ , and _I love you_ the whole way through. After they cleaned their mixed orgasms off of Harry’s quivering stomach, Draco held him and murmured, half asleep, “That was much better.”

 

**_March 26 th – A Gift for Harry_ **

****

On a bright afternoon, far too nice to be stuck inside, Harry walked with Ron and Hermione to their Transfiguration classroom. Two more classes to get through for the day, and then he’d be free for the weekend. Plans with Draco occupied the forefront of his mind, and Ron and Hermione’s chatting faded to the background.

Until Hermione stopped and picked something up off the floor. “What’s this?”

Mildly curious, Ron and Harry both glanced at the colorful square of paper she’d found.

It took him a second to make sense of the image.

And then Harry’s heart skipped a beat and raced to catch up when he realized what he was looking at.

A photograph.

“It’s just a picture of the Quidditch pitch,” Hermione said.

“Let me see that?” Harry tried to sound calm as he took it from her.

Oh fuck.

It was like he had used an erection charm, his cock throbbed so stiff, so fast.

The picture was of Draco, his hair and skin glistening as he lay splayed out on a bed with his legs wide open. As the loop of motion played, he winked at the camera and pressed a finger into his hole.

Behind him, Ron said to Hermione, “Yeah, I think maybe that’s not actually a photo of the Quidditch pitch.”

“Oh, honestly,” Hermione scoffed, but Harry ignored them both. This was for him. Draco must have left it in this hallway for a reason. On alert, he looked back over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of white blond hair.

At the end of the hall, Draco leaned against the wall and smirked at him, and Harry’s mouth fell open as his breathing quickened. Draco crooked a finger in an unmistakable come-hither gesture that made Harry’s knees buckle before he disappeared around the corner.

“Gotta go!” Harry shouted to his friends as he clutched the picture and took off.

“Harry!” Hermione shouted at him. “You can’t miss class!”

But it was too late. He grinned as he ran after his boyfriend, eager to start their weekend plans early, and to thank him for the unexpected gift.

**Author's Note:**

> Mini Epilogue - For Valentine's Day next year, Harry gets Draco a dog. A dachshund, not a beagle. Outwardly, they call her Lady, but her proper name, which they use at home, is Lady Wiggleton.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed, please check out my other fics or follow me on tumblr: http://norelationtoatticus.tumblr.com/
> 
> Notes on how I approached consent in this story: At its most basic, this story is about boundaries, and Harry's key takeaway is that boundaries are sexy--communicating boundaries, respecting boundaries, communicating changes in boundaries--because it implies an ongoing, growing sexual rapport. In this fic, Harry finds a fun, sexy way to communicate a change in boundaries. I wanted to keep this story largely fluffy and cute, and also explore how living through the war and being brought up in sexually repressed households (Harry, with the abusive Dursleys, and Draco with his proper pureblood parents) might make these two feel unsure, hesitant, and wrong-footed when it comes to sex and relationships. Instead of having them struggle to say no, I thought it would be fun to watch them struggle to say yes. In this story, Harry and Draco are two broken goober babies who want each other badly but barely know how to be human, let alone boyfriends. They stumble through miscommunications, assumptions, and externally-defined expectations, until they realize they have to trust themselves and each other, and they have to find ways to communicate as they learn to read one another in their specificity.


End file.
